67. Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers, "Affection" (1979)

(listen)

After the classic proto-punk dimensions of the first Modern Lovers album, the one with "Roadrunner," the one that John Cale produced, I used to wonder how serious Jonathan Richman was about the shtick that came on the '70s Beserkley albums that followed: Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, Rock 'n' Roll with the Modern Lovers, and Back in Your Life. I acquired all four of those albums out of a cutout bin on one memorable day. Those cutesy songs about ice cream and bugs and Martians and abominable snowmen—was it some kind of joke? Was he mocking us? These questions were answered once and for all, as far as I'm concerned, when I arrived at this song. He is not only serious, he is deadly serious, and what he's concerned about (then and even now, still, more than 30 years on) is the drought of human connection that is killing us alive. "Well, people all over the world are starvin' just for affection," he says. Sings. "Well, but to me this ain't funny. To me this is real." It's not easy to give up the distancing routines that help protect the most vulnerable parts of ourselves, and Richman himself is not immune from the temptation. As much as anything that's what he's doing in his self-consciously playful goofs, perhaps less so when he loosens up to rock 'n' roll, the facility for which remains strong in him. But the message of this song is the bedrock message he has to tell, and rarely is it distilled with such precision to its essence. "Well, there's telephones, televisions, cars, yes / And there's records and books and magazines for you / But poor affection sits there standing in the corner," Richman sings. Coleridge put it another way—"Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink"—but it amounts to the same thing.