The Heart Is Strange

Product Information

Propaganda is a German synth-pop band formed in Düsseldorf in 1982. They signed a recording contract with ZTT Records as early as 1983 and released their first single "Dr Mabuse" in 1984. Followed by their debut studio album, the critically acclaimed A Secret Wish, in 1985. Two of the album's singles, " Dr. Mabuse" and " Duel", were UK Top 30 hits. A second studio album, 1234 (1990), was recorded with a markedly different line-up and released by Virgin Records to less success. [1] There have been several partial reformations of the group in the 21st century, with the original vocalists currently active as xPropaganda. Singles [ edit ] List of singles, with selected chart positions, showing year released and album name

It is conventional to describe Berryman as “ confessional”: as one of a group of American poets of the 1950s and 1960s, including also Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, for whom the use of personal material was a special and distinguishing mark. The tenacity of the term “confessional” lies partly in a way of reading: we feel that the real biographical experience gives the poem weight, and yet this is also, of course, a deliberate literary effect. Particularly in Berryman, there is a careful balance of new freedom and old rules. That which is hidden is set against that which is displayed, as if each poem were half a secret. Lipson says that a new manager didn’t help. “We spent a fortune doing [A Secret Wish], but it was so worth doing. The manager wouldn’t see it that way because they hadn’t lived the journey.”Written before an age of cell phones, this event seems oddly archaic, sweet and old-fashioned. It is also magical, in its faith in will over circumstance, and it is what we do—in miniature—when we read. Berryman invites us to drink with him. In reading his poems, we clink glasses across the decades.

Maybe,” Freytag suggests, “Propaganda represents a different kind of 80s. It’s not what we associate with … the Duran Duran side of the 80s.” The first single from the album, "Heaven Give Me Words", was co-written with 1980s synth-pop star Howard Jones [6] and reached the UK Top 40. The album was not as successful as A Secret Wish, only peaking at number 46 in the UK. A second single, "Only One Word", stalled at number 71 in the UK.

Follow Us

Nearly 40 years after A Secret Wish, Propaganda’s frontwomen reunite with their producer to reclaim their rightful place among synth-pop’s finest … They stake a claim to this territory from the outset, with The Night’s roar of synths evoking ZTT’s mid-80s glory days and its stabs of synthetic strings, not to mention Terry Edwards’ muted trumpets, surely intended to recall the tense feast that was their debut’s opener. Chasing Utopia’s simmering keyboards prolong this pleasure, too, with Lipson’s guitar another nod to earlier production styles and muttered German texts underlining the band’s Teutonic roots. xPropaganda / The Heart Is Strange: 'all formats' unboxing". SuperDeluxeEdition. 20 May 2022 . Retrieved 23 March 2023. Reading Berryman’s early poetry is like playing a guessing game: who does he sound like now? He is Thomas here, and then he is Yeats; here he is Auden and here he is Eliot. His titles echo others; he is borrowing his syntax and vocabulary; he is a young man, taking what is good, trying out what works. It is by walking through this funhouse of mirrors and influence that he became himself, for across his career and culminating in The Dream Songs, Berryman will turn mimicry to his advantage and invent a poetics that is also an echo chamber. He will find a voice that is recognizably his own—perhaps the most distinctive voice of 20th-century American poetry—but he will find it in the voices of others. As he wrote in an early poem: The heartbreak is familiar but the heart is strange. Berryman liked language that is particular to place. When he arrived in England in 1936 he immediately wrote home to explain the local currency: “Sixpence is a tanner, the shilling a bob, the pound a quid.” He was on his way to Cambridge University, where he had been awarded a fellowship and where he dressed in tweed suits and changed his voice. He was 21. “I suppose it is correct to say that I prefer their accent to the ‘American’ accent,” he wrote. For the rest of his life he followed English spelling both in private letters and in his published work. W. S. Merwin was a student of Berryman’s at the University of Iowa in 1946, and he recalled his teacher’s voice: “[H]e snapped down his nose with an accent / I think he had affected in England.”