
You will all Mary! me for pretension, but I don't care, it must be said to set the record straight - the uncomfortable, true, real and painful answer is 'Precious Box'.
My fucking Gods, that song. It's an agonisingly sad, prescient, and almost frightening. It is an abyss of sound set to words cut out of GM's heart. Listening to it is akin to gazing up into the night sky, and then realising with a slam of awareness and mortal dread that the black star-studded heavens you see are in fact endless airless tracts of nothingness dotted with gaseous clouds that would incinerate you miles off.
In its shimmering eerie intelligence and transcendental feel, I would compare it to a more forbidding dark and mournful song by Peter Gabriel, say 'San Jacinto' or 'The Tower That Ate People'. This is just a hunch but, to me 'Precious Box' is one of those songs that seemed to frighten even George himself, with how it reached far further and deeper into places beyond anything else he ever recorded - when he wrote it, the mission was obviously no longer about the singing, or the pop palatability, but the stark purity of truth and expressing it in a way that touched a nerve.
There is an unflinching and clammy honesty in the vocals, that keen above the spinning alarms, unrelenting hissing drums, and drone of the haunting strings of the instrumental. The complexity of the lyrics exceeds any other by GM, to the point that it's poetry. To read, 'Precious Box' is the raging cynical lament of a soul who is not only lost, but has been totally forgotten, completely warped, and has abandoned himself to the depravity and meaninglessness of his existence. By the end the listener is both desperately sorry for the narrator in his humane yearning and disappointment, and yet also deeply creeped out by his pathetic vampiric overtures and cruel aphorisms (I'm actually surprised it isn't a hit with DL....)
The performance he gave of the song at LIVE 25 changed something in me, fundamentally. From the snow effect of a tv-screen with no signal in the background, to the wash of noise from the effects, to the breathless and wry delivery of the ending line, 'you may wish you could turn back Time' as George hides his face from the crowd....brrrrr, no words.
When I caught this performance, I was in the throes of a deep depression at the time, and seeing and hearing 'Precious Box' done so immediately just exorcised some part of the demon that was riding me. It didn't cure my depression, but it catharsized me, somehow. I cried as I listened; no, not in the fawning fangirl way or the 'yas Kween' way - I mean raw, jagged, broken gasps of painful sobbing that took me off-guard because it felt like something was being torn from my chest.
[quote] Give me your life, give me your life, I want it, because lately it's so freezing out here....
[quote] It's the money or your life; I said, don't you know you can't have both? Take that picture, stop acting so dumb, don't you know that the moment will come I will find someone like you - with something a little extra?
[quote] You may want to strip again, you may want to let me in, you may want to sacrifice, more than you think is fair or right....you may want to think again, you may want to watch your friends, you may want to change your mind.....
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