Bounce
Writers - Tennant/Lowe
Unreleased
Neil and Chris recorded this way back in 1987, around the same time as "Domino Dancing." It employs the clever/twee gimmick of having a percussion track in which a drum machine goes through every sound in its library, one by one, in time with the music. Fortunately, the effect is much subtler than it sounds from that description, which saves the song from being a novelty. More obvious and much more memorable is the way in which the sampled sound of Neil singing the word "bounce" is used for a "stuttering" effect throughout the track. (The idea, however, was almost certainly to convey a "bouncing" effect as opposed to stuttering.)
It's a lovely, if somber, midtempo song, although its rather curious melody takes some getting used to. Lyrically, it ruminates on an extremely tentative, apprehensive love relationship with someone who comes across as moody and perhaps even a little dangerous. This apprehension is most strongly conveyed in several remarkable lines:
Will you bleed me dry?
Will you be the one that I look back upon
From a prison cell with regret?
The narrator clearly realizes that this relationship is no good for him—he may even wind up in prison because of this person!—yet he's not ready to give up. The title comes from the refrain, which may be the narrator addressing either himself or this questionable lover, or perhaps both: "When you're up, when you're down—baby, bounce." He seems willing to accept this dangerous relationship ("… shall we burn?"), understanding that he and his partner will need to bounce along with the inevitable bumps in the road (which is probably a major understatement) if they're to have any chance together.
Chris and Neil at one time thought about including this track on Introspective. In fact, they seriously considered Bounce as the title of the album, which they said was because they had observed a lot of people "bouncing" in clubs rather than more conventionally "dancing."
Annotations
- "Somebody said that history teaches nothing" - The "somebody" Neil mentions in this line of the song may be the great German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), who wrote paradoxically, "History teaches us that man learns nothing from history" (sometimes alternately translated as "History teaches that history teaches nothing," from his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, collected and published in 1837) and, on another occasion, only a little less paradoxically, "What experience and history teaches us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it." On the other hand, maybe Neil had someone far more recent in mind. Only a few months before the Boys apparently wrote this song, Sting released his 1987 album …Nothing Like the Sun, which includes his song "History Will Teach Us Nothing"—itself almost certainly inspired (consciously or unconsciously) by Hegel.
List cross-references
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