Annie Lennox's Walking On Broken Glass

I've given myself the task of writing about one song a week for 2024 because, well, I think it'd be fun.

Annie Lennox's Walking On Broken Glass

I don't know why we can't ever leave pop, but OK. Maybe we need pop to warm up this nasty New England winter.

In any case, I'll file my apology form to Annie Lennox: I was wrong. Mercury was in retrograde, and "Diva" (1992) is a great album. "Walking On Broken Glass" is a great song. It may be among one of the greatest pop songs in the 20th century. (I'd actually like to see someone compile that list; the difficulty would be unimaginable.)

I'll be honest: I think I heard "Walking On Broken Glass" in its entirety maybe a few years ago, and I thought, "Oh, a white British lady trying to co-opt Caribbean music." OK, that's not necessarily wrong, but what did I think of the lyrics? I recall (my recall when it comes to art is spectacular, when it cannot summon people's birthdays, doctor's appointments et cetera; very strange) I must have thought something like, "Oh, another song about a break-up."

Really? Really, dude? Only by whim - and by coincidence, as it turns out Swift's "1989" was influenced by Lennox - did I return to "Diva", largely because I thought the whole idea of "walking on broken glass" funny/meme-y. And the single is, indeed, funny. But that's what's so remarkable about it. The single is a lot of things because it embraces its contradictions: sadness and joy, pain and happiness, brutality and tenderness. That's why you're afforded the luxury to laugh at the song, as its singer emerged out of it invincible.

The really funny thing is that this song swept me up while writing up the Swift / Carey article. Two of the greatest pop musicians of the last two decades or so, and every time I would try to get into the mood to write it i.e. listening to the music, I would inevitably say, "But I want to listen to Walking On Broken Glass again." And then, would. That rarely happens to me, a craving so intense it breaks logic.

It's that inimitable blend of melancholy and joy. Should we simply turn to the greatest lyrics in the song to understand why? "And if you're trying to cut me down / you know that I might bleed; / 'cause if you're trying to cut me down, / I know that you'll succeed, / and if you want to hurt me / there's nothing left to feed / 'cause if you want to hurt me, / you're doing really well, my dear." I think the reason why I couldn't comprehend the song was a result of my focusing far too intently on the instrumentals and the "general mood" of the music. Taken alone, these are lyrics of despair, of someone who is resigned to a fate of only feeling pain. So where does Lennox's triumph, her optimism come from? It comes from that very pain; it comes from the pain of knowing oneself and one's own flaws, and knowing that one must live, after all, in spite of the pain, or because of it, and understanding that joy as well as pain comes from living.

But, because we have heard so many songs in the past, we're hardened to messages like these, and take the cynical route of believing that pain is, after all, pain, and leads to nothing else. Let's turn our attention back to those lyrics, then. "And if you're trying to cut me down / you know that I might ble-e-e-e-e-e-ed," she says, quivering in fear of the lash. It's a moment of emotional vulnerability, and it's actually quite self-deprecating, for such an upbeat song. It's a line sung with her head hanging low, her glance astray. "'Cause if you want to hurt me, / I know that you'll succ-e-e-e-e-e-ed." Again, asserting her powerlessness. This is beginning to sound like the diary of a tortured teenager. But a teenager fights back; they return insults, they trade blows, they denigrate the other, while denigrating themselves, in a kind of grand suicidal gesture. Annie is simply saying this as fact, without embellishing. This is where the empowerment, the joy comes from; there is an understanding, and there, too, is the nuance that the torture comes from the one she admires, perhaps loves. It's...well, ballsy. That's Aristotle's definition of courage: to accept pain in exchange for the greater good. And that's what we, as the audience, understand to be Annie's reward.

The Caribbean-inflected intro is really dwarfed by the track's overall influence by disco and orchestral pop. Much like Papageno's glockenspiel in "The Magic Flute", which is an anomaly and not a part of the orchestra (such that no one knows what the instrument actually was in Mozart's day), the piano line is the break, the invitation into a different world. That's the other method she toes, in bipolar fashion, dread and hope: the orchestra reflects the grandiosity of the drama of her heart, and the piano returns back to us the color that is familiar to us when we feel the joys of love, as she had once felt.

While talking about the Pet Shop Boys' "Shameless" I speculated that pop has, and perhaps ought to have, fairly silly lyrics. What... does "walking on broken glass" mean? Well, it certainly hurts, but why that metaphor? Given Lennox had a bit of writer's block while making "Diva", it may mean nothing, but, I think, pop thrives on randomness, or rather, random fixation or obsession. It worked well for her, as the imagery of glass implies architecture, allowing her to forward the metaphor in the second verse. "The sun's shining in the big, blue sky / but it don't mean nothing to me," which has echoes of Doug Yule crooning, "Who loves the sun?" "Whoa-oh, let the rain come down, / let the wind blow through me; / I'm living in an empty room, / the windows smashed; / and I've got so little left to lose / that it feels just like I'm walking on broken glass." Again, it means nothing, or reaches at nothing universal, but the particularness is fertile for dramatic expression, such that the audience can see it, even when it's inane. It's a reminder that Shakespeare makes us feel more than think; he definitely wrote some stinkers. (My favorite example: Hamlet's "For 'tis the sport to have the engineer / Hoist with his own petard and 't shall go hard / But I will delive one yard below their mines / And blow them at the moon." ...He thinks the explosives are strong enough to blow them to the moon? (On reflection, there's also a Tom-and-Jerry-esque feel to these lines.))

There's something wonderfully ironic and arrogant about British music. They're certainly arrogant about their sense of irony, but there's also an awareness that the irony is purchased at the price of sin. Only a Brit could write "Diva", balanced with simmering anger and tenderness, with poetic language and common feeling, with archness and vulnerability. It's especially funny how "Diva" is a critique on the media's perception of her and her embrace of that perception, because she was feeling great about life, the wisdom she acquired and her pregnancy at the time. Consider how radiant Lennox is in "Why", crying "Why don't you ever learn to keep your big mouth shut?", following this bit of crassness with the moving "That's why it hurts so bad to hear the words that keep on falling from your mouth." Pettiness, weirdly enough, is crucial to our humanity. It helps us to empathize and forgive people in their moments of smallness; it even allows us to, perhaps, open the door, by a crack, into someone's personal sadness, which is only composed of a million small sadnesses. That's why we admire divas, I suppose, because they represent our lives not as they are but as we feel them.