About the episode

The year is 1972 and I’ve just met Barbie. I am not long turned 16. Barbie will have an immediate and lasting effect on my life, but, as we’re just concerned with music here, I want to share with you the music that she shared with me.

These were what I consider to be her songs. Yes, this is a collection of songs, whereas at that time my appreciation of music was actually focused at a more specifically sonic level.
I tended to like the instrumental passages in the music I listened to, and lyrical detail always rather passed me by. I’d been enjoying the blues-based riffs of Cream, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and other similar ‘hard rock’ bands of that era. At an opposite extreme I was beginning an exploration into the avant garde electronics of the nascent Kosmische Musik of bands from Berlin, Düsseldorf and Cologne. Meeting Barbie introduced me to another sphere of music, and prepared me for another way of listening.

I’d always heard the human voice as another instrument, and it seems I seldom paid attention to the words I was hearing. I enjoyed the cadence of a female voice, say, or a lyric sung in a language I did not understand. I can’t really have been fully cogniscent of that for I am now genuinely surprised that I feel I am only hearing the songs properly as songs now, and I must previously never have really taken in much specific meaning from what I was listening to at all.

This collection, then, displays more depth and maturity than perhaps I did at the time. And over time I’ve come to appreciate these songs more and more. Barbie adored these songs. She would play them often, and consequently they have stuck with me. That said, there is a somewhat melancholy tone to many of them. This fact was not entirely lost on me, as I thought some of them far too ‘girly’ and not at all what a sophisticated music afficianado should listen to. How wrong was I?

Perhaps the most surprising thing is that so many sad songs were so loved by a girl who had such a bright disposition and always adopted a happy-go-lucky approach to life. Nothing seemed to get in her way, and things in life always seemed to go her way quite naturally. These songs reveal a sentimentality that she did not display in her day to day life. In many ways she quite suited the name Barbie, although she was not blonde, was nobody’s toy, and had a mind that was already adult, intelligent and focused on a bright future. I wonder what she thinks of this collection now.

Tracklisting

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