My True Colo(u)rs

The Pipettes “I Love You” – It has become clear to me over the past two weeks that I made a small mistake by omitting the Pipettes’ debut album from both of my critics poll ballots. (Not that it would have made all that much difference in their rank on the Idolator poll.) All of their songs aside from “Pull Shapes,” “One Night Stand,” and “Dirty Mind” (all of which resided on a frequently-played iPod playlist) had fallen out of my rotation in the fourth quarter of 2006, and so I just was not thinking about the record very much. Upon revisiting the album, I’ve realized a few things, chief among them that a) We Are The Pipettes is a lot better than I remembered it being, b) that it is a more consistently great record than half of what I actually voted for, and c) that some of the tracks that I had mostly ignored at first have become some of my favorites now.

Of those initially ignored cuts, “I Love You” is the one that followed the most dramatic arc, starting off as a brief song that I barely acknowledged to ending up among my four or five favorites on the record. As I came to appreciate We Are The Pipettes as an album rather than a collection of singles, I realized that “I Love You” was not simply a quick, sentimental track tacked on at the end but rather the logical conclusion of the set. Throughout the sequence, the Pipettes present themselves in high esteem, and at least half of the songs come at the expense of the men who objectify them, culminating in the cheerfully cruel “One Night Stand.” “I Love You” comes only a couple minutes later, and lyrically, it’s a complete 180 — the girls are self-deprecating and a bit insecure, and suddenly quite open to the notion of unconditional love if only the object of their affection would return the favor. They seem overwhelmed and helpless by realizing that they love this guy (it’s sorta weird speaking about them collectively when this is clearly a song sung from a singular point of view!), and the song is less a declaration to the person in question than an admission to themselves.

It reminds me a bit of that amazing scene in the most recent episode of The Office in which we’re all expecting Melora Hardin’s stern Jan Levinson to tear into Steve Carell’s Michael Scott for semi-accidentally spreading a revealing photo of them both on vacation in Jamaica, but she instead (SPOILERS, obviously) spins off on an emotional tangent that serves to explain her previously inexplicable attraction to him, and totally befuddle both Michael and the audience. Essentially, Jan is a lonely, troubled woman with a self-destructive streak who is seeking some measure of happiness, even if it means totally redefining the word. She acknowledges that Michael is all wrong for her, and yet she wants him anyway, perhaps not realizing that this utterly clueless yet genuinely well-meaning man is just as lonely (if not more so), and actually cares for her even if he has the emotional maturity of a pre-teen boy. The funny thing is, the song works just as well for either character – the sudden, perhaps mildly terrifying clarity is definitely more Jan, but the recognition of inadequacy is a match for Michael, who knows that he’s in way over his head, and has almost no idea of what to do about this baffling situation that has fallen into his lap. (Click here to buy it from Insound.)