#i'm down

[ohmylul]

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell | S01E05 Arabella

[idleronanisle]

Watched Down with Love (2003) and fell in love with Ewan all over again

Also- bonus sketch of an old photoshoot. I'm s(creaming)

[cognitiveinequality]

[totally-not-nessie]

Why is Roderick Heffley x Regina George suddenly on my dash and why do I love it

[tiredspacedragon]

As a character, Jacinthe kind of horrifies me, like this woman needs to be stopped, but hot damn if she doesn't have one of the best battle themes in Pokémon like...ever

[rannieverse]

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGda3d2bB/

so what I'm hearing is... hoonranwon threesome au? Is that what you're implying....? be honest. BECAUSE I'M DOWN! I'M LIKE SOOOOO DOWN!! I'M LIKE THE DOWNEST

[tavolgisvist]

For all the gusto he wrings from “Sally,” there’s more Paul in “I’m Down,” and more Beatles. <…> As the singer, Paul plays the blue-balled protagonist—the pain in his voice stems from his unrequited passion. His lover won’t give in, and he is beside himself—frustrated, crazed, inexorably down. But within this context, Paul turns the music into a celebratory frenzy, not a lament, but a raised clenched fist, twisting disappointment into a raging storm of self assertion. If dancing on your problems is what rock ’n’ roll is all about (as Pete Townshend says), then “I’m Down” follows in the tradition of songs like “That’s All Right (Mama)” and “Blue Suede Shoes.”

It resembles “Long Tall Sally” most during Paul’s opening: one mad voice screaming at the top of its lungs. The band punctuates his singing fiercely, and the ensemble is tight to the point of bursting—Ringo’s snare drum alone has a snap that literally stings. There’s a power in the sound of these four men playing these three chords that has nothing to do with volume. As they swing into the refrain, the background vocals give away the tone: the shape of their phrase is parodic—“I’m really down.” (There is a fourth, slightly concealed voice singing the bass line, holding out the roots of each chord on the word “down.”)

After a full round of “I’m down”s, the band stops and the backup singers chide the vocalist with his own tormented question. The call-and-response figure is turned inside out, with the backups chiding “How can you laugh” and Paul responding “when you know I’m down?” Almost inadvertently, it gives the song balance: the verses all begin with this poor soul, and the refrains all end with his same naked cries, mocked by the supporting singers. Where Little Richard had a flair for code words and hairstyles, McCartney adds a knack for the dramatic.

George’s guitar solo is his most confidently unhinged yet—it doesn’t even have to be brought in by a scream. By the time Paul starts hollering behind him, George is already well off his head. Those repeated notes near the end—the ones he bends and prances on—sting as much as Ringo’s snare. Paul twists the third and final vocal solo out of shape the same way he does on “Long Tall Sally,” and his fury charges the band to even greater heights. <…> Lennon’s organ solo subsumes Paul’s most irrepressible scream—“When you know I’m WAA!!!” In the film of their 1965 Shea Stadium concert, John’s manic keyboard playing (elbow glissandos, howls of laughter) is like a comment on the absurdity of their own half-hour set.

<…> The band’s hysteria on this song mirrors their fans’ deafening adulation, and this image of Lennon bashing his way through his friend’s rocker, wet with sweat and too turned on to care, is the perfect visual track to this B-side manifesto.

Paul’s ad-lib vocal climax before the fade-out makes even the initial outbursts sound civilized. When he sings “Well baby, baby, BABY!!!!” in growing annoyance at the taunting chirps of John and George’s backup, he aims to blow the whole song’s fuse. <…> Meanwhile, the band veers breathlessly close to the edge of hysteria, and it’s to Ringo’s credit that things don’t fall apart. The hardest assignment for any drummer is to let the others cut loose to the extreme while providing a steady beat for them to fall back on. Lesser bands would easily come unglued with a groove so addled and punctured; Ringo maintains a sure but unconfining backbeat for the madness, the strongest glue of all.

(Tell Me Why by Tim Riley, 1998/2002)