There’s A Pleasure In This Fear

Hot Chip featuring Jarvis Cocker “Straight to the Morning”

“Straight to the Morning” is a joyful disco/house track with lyrics about partying all night and into the next day. It functions perfectly well at face value, but this being a Hot Chip song, there’s some subtextual layers of pathos under the boppy beats and bright chords – scratch the surface just a little bit, and it’s a song about aging. This is three middle aged men singing about going out all night, and how saying all of this feels a bit different in the context of being older. When Alexis Taylor announces “we’re going out tonight,” it comes across as announcing something that’s more of an event than a regular occurrence. The idea of dancing all night seems a little more daunting than it would be for guys in their 20s. When Joe Goddard sings “it’s a small slice of heaven,” the joy feels a bit more hard-earned. When the ever-droll Jarvis Cocker says “we’ve only just begun to get it on,” the words sound a little overly optimistic. But this song isn’t a joke at their own expense, it’s a song arguing that there shouldn’t be an arbitrary age limit for dancing and having fun. If anything, they’re arguing that there’s always a time for this sort of release.

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