Bananarama Cruel Summer 2017 live

投稿者: Felix P: Cruel Summer

Cruel Summer hit different in 2017. The heat, the boredom, that feeling of being left behind while everyone else is on holiday, all of it was still in the song. But the women singing it weren't the same as the ones who first recorded it back in 1983. Back then, they were young, broke, and inexperienced, and the song was about to blow up and take them everywhere, which was almost too neat an irony for a track about being left out. Thirty-four years later, the same chorus carries a different weight. You can hear the old frustration, but there's also something the younger voices couldn't have given it: memory. They're not wondering if the miserable afternoon will ever end. They know it did. They've had other summers since, good and bad, and the song has outlasted all of them. That changes the word 'cruel.' When you're twenty, a bad summer can feel permanent because you don't have enough evidence that life moves on. One lonely season can fill the whole horizon. By the time you've lived through decades, you know better. The heat passes. People leave and sometimes come back. The person you thought you'd never forget becomes someone you remember differently. The 2017 performance has this odd double exposure. There's the young Bananarama in the recording, restless and trapped, and there are the older women in front of an audience that already knows how the story turned out. They don't have to recreate their younger selves for the song to work. Their voices still carry enough of the old character for the past to stay audible, while everything they've lived through sits quietly behind it. Maybe that's why older performances of old songs can be more revealing than the originals. The melody stays exactly where you left it, but the person singing it has accumulated a life around the words. Cruel Summer used to sound like a complaint about being left out. In 2017, it sounds a little like a reunion with the person who once made that complaint. And maybe that's the part nostalgia gets wrong. We don't really return to the old song. We bring our present selves with us, and suddenly the same three minutes contain two different lives. The summer is still cruel. But this time, they know it ends.