Song of the Day 9/23: Modern English, “I Melt With You”
Vladimir Putin is threatening to use nuclear weapons to bail himself out of the war he needlessly started. That strikes me as similar to a man who’s freezing to death deciding to set himself on fire, but it has frightened a lot people.
We’ll have to see if the sentiment adds to the stockpile of songs warning about nuclear war, which has grown rather slowly since the days of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the corresponding Great Folk Music Scare. Or maybe songwriters just got more obscure about it. For example, I heard this 1983 song a thousand times without ever realizing that it depicts a couple making love when a nuclear bomb falls. There’s nothing in the lyrics to indicate it, so I guess we have to take singer and lyricist Robbie Grey’s word for it.
Modern English is considered a one-hit wonder, but “I Melt With You” was never an actual hit — its best showing on the Billboard Hot 100 was No. 76, though it made it to No. 7 on the Mainstream Rock chart. In the band’s native UK it didn’t chart at all.
The band broke up and regrouped, but couldn’t escape the shadow of the tune, which shows up on a lot of soundtracks. Modern English re-recorded the song a couple of times. The last, in 2011 for the soundtrack of a movie of the same name, deconstructs the original in a manner befitting a film that Rotten Tomatoes calls “a misanthropic marathon of bad behavior.” It includes zero nuclear explosions.
