When I was fifteen I was highly enamored of Blur’s “On Your Own”. I was taken with the guitar effect that kicks in at the end of each repetition of the riff, which I’ve since realized is just a particularly ingenious use of some relatively standard delay tricks. I was excited by the lyrics, which spoke about some things I understood, some things I didn’t and generally, and I still think I’m correct about this, were more or less nonsense. The electronic edge it had also added to my enjoyment - I had recently discovered that the drums on many songs were actually machines!

I never saw the video at the time. Understandable since the song did nothing in the US, maybe we never a single over here. Doubly understandable based on what the video actually contains. It would have confused me to no end then, and actually confuses me quite a good deal still.

Leaving aside the whole issue of the thing being dated as hell, it brings out a number of qualities of the song that I were not consciously recognized by me at the time, or even perhaps until I saw the video. One of these is the fact (?) that it’s sort of trying to be a hip hop song. While this is totally the wrong way to think about the song, it’s possible that that’s how the band and their marketing team saw it, and so they put Damon Albarn in a Kangol, called in some break dancers, and did some really misguided stuff with graffiti. This is sort of a travesty. Sure, the chorus isn’t exactly sung, and there’s an arpeggiated synth running through the thing, but damn, aren’t Blur smarter than to think that that means what they’re doing has anything to do with hip hop?

Maybe that’s why Graham Coxon looks so embarrassed through the whole thing. I don’t blame him.

And what’s Alex James even doing in the video? He must have demanded not be seen in the same frame with any of his bandmates, or near an actual instrument, or doing anything. “I’ll be in the video, but I won’t do anything more than wear this weird  Magritte t-shirt.” 

Which is all to say, wow. I’m very glad the 15 year old me was not exposed to this, because I doubt he still would have loved the song as much. And this, in fact, is a song that deserves to be loved. It may be silly, and if the video is any guide, it’s intentions may be somewhat misguided, but it captures a certain adolescent playfulness - let’s play with synths and delay, let’s make up some stupid lyrics - with a sense of gravity that Blur manages to pull off though, if nothing more, pure Anglophilic exoticism. Perhaps my doing their worst to appropriate American urban culture, they simply highlighted what made them so bloody English to begin with, and that’s the wavelength that still has me reaching for this song each spring, even 15 years later.