A Little Respect

"A Little Respect" opens with one of pop's great small gestures: a bright, chugging acoustic-guitar figure Vince Clarke lets breathe for a bar before the synths bloom in around it, warm and analog and slightly toy-like. Clarke's genius was always melodic economy, and the song is built from hooks stacked on hooks — the descending verse, the pre-chorus lift, and then that chorus where Andy Bell leaps into a high, exposed "sooooul" and holds it, cracking slightly, sounding like he means it more than the arrangement strictly requires. That gap between Clarke's tidy pop machinery and Bell's emotional excess is what makes Erasure work. The lyric is a plea from inside a relationship where the singer is doing all the reaching — "I try to discover a little something to make me sweeter" — self-deprecating, a little humiliated, and utterly without bitterness. Bell was one of very few openly gay pop singers in 1988 Britain, the year of Section 28, and singing a love song without pronoun-hiding was a quiet act of refusal. It became a football-terrace singalong, a karaoke standard, a gay anthem, all at once. Play it with the car windows down, or when you need something that lets you feel sorry for yourself and cheerful simultaneously.