Minds Music Monday – Traffic (Minus “Human”)

As alluded to on Friday, I wanted to discuss the curious case of ‘Traffic’ for Minds Music Monday. 

I’m perplexed. For a band that prided itself in not pandering to the whims and wishes of others, it seems a complete exercise in pandering to “radio play” to change the title of the track to the singular ‘Traffic’ and to also, seemingly, alter parts of the song lyrics. Does the song not lose any sense of satirical potency by taking away the line “it’s high on fumes and misery” to “it’s high on dreams and memories”? Don’t get me wrong! I love the subjectivity of the replacement line, but it comes at the expense of seemingly Jim’s main reason for wanting to have Russell Mael on board as a guest co-vocalist – ie: to subvert the dark tone the song has with that line in it! I mean…whaaaa?! Why?! Why play around with it? Why this….desire to make it radio friendly? 

I know he’d tell me to go to hell with my thinking here. And that is exactly WHY I am wanting to discuss this and bring this to task because, seemingly, if I was a record executive or a director of a radio station, I’d be justified in saying “Look, Jim. Can you just drop the “human” part of the title, and also could you take out that line there?” A similar thing happened when they performed The Walls Came Down. Altered lyrics to pander to the “everything’s coming up roses” crap of the BBC. They can keep their political neutrality while letting others express political agendas. I mean for crying out loud, they’ve given the likes of Nick Robinson, Laura Kuensburg, Andrew Marr and Andrew Neil enough of a mouthpiece to express their political agendas, as well as having fascist lovers like Nigel Farage on enough times but have a band on and make them alter the lyrics because we “don’t want to upset the listener now.” GIVE ME STRENGTH!

Is the radio play REALLY worth it? How many more sales do you actually push with this? 

So, as much as I actually like the alternate lines, that is not as you seemingly intended the song to be, Jim. Why compromise? Why do that? 

I actually thought the lyric change was only on the acoustic version of the song, but no, it’s been changed on the single release as a whole. I didn’t even listen to the single release version because I thought it would be the same as the album version. It wasn’t until Valeria in her post on SMOG discussing the altering of the line did I even know it had been done to both versions of the song on the single. 

So, as much as I love that alternate line, I worry to what extent it was done as a means of pandering for airplay which just makes me feel a little sad. I liked the way Jim explained the reason for the original line’s existence, the bringing in of Russell Mael, and the words bringing a tone of darkness underlying an otherwise ultimately optimistic song. That made it VERY Simple Minds to me. It was a modern display of the signature “black light” as I refer to it. And now that whole aspect of the song has been cast aside. That makes me feel a bit disheartened. But, hey…whatever. I’m not the BBC. I’m not a record company A&R person. What do I know? 

That’s my peace. 

Here’s the acoustic version of ‘Traffic’. Enjoy!