RAMBLE ON: "World in Motion" by Englandneworder

I first started getting into soccer in 2010. I was not really into sports at the time; I had watched various New York teams with my dad as a kid but I had grown out of it after leaving home. But I was jobless, just out of grad school and bored that day, and I remembered that the World Cup was happening so I flipped it on. That day I got to watch the defending champs Italy get bounced out in the first round by lowly Slovakia, and I started to fall in love. In 2012 I visited Ireland, and all the locals were amped that the national team had qualified for the Euros for the first time in ages, so I watched the entire tournament, and from then on I was hooked. (Ireland lost all three of their games, and have largely stunk ever since, but they’ve always been my second team.)

My soccer fandom only increased as my career as a professional music talker guy progressed into a full-time occupation. These weren’t unrelated trends – working from home drives you insane (as most of you found out this past year), I needed something to structure my day around, and the great thing about soccer is that it’s basically always there. Every single day there’s a game (for me, conveniently in the early afternoon because of the time difference), and when the off-season starts that means it’s time for the summer international tournaments. Mitchell and Webb’s famous SkySports sketch (“ALL THE FOOTBALL, ALL THE TIME! Catch all of the constantly happening FOOTBALL here! It's ALL here and it's ALL FOOTBALL, ALWAYS! CONSTANT DIZZYING YEAR-ROUND ENDLESS FOOTBALL!”) isn’t funny until you really grasp how ceaseless and throttling the sport’s hold is over there – multiple overlapping tournaments, every level from the top down mattering because of promotion/relegation, multiple prominent leagues in various countries vying for attention.

I’ve done my best to make my two passions overlap – as most Internet writers have discovered, there’s a lot of overlooked content to be mined in the intersection of separate pastimes – and there’s more than plenty of soccer-related music in the world. The major problem, though, is that soccer songs generally suck, and more importantly suck in a culturally specific way that I don’t really get as an American. For example, in 1970 the English World Cup Squad recorded a song, “Back Home,” that hit #1 in the UK. I don’t have a clue why anyone would ever listen to it; it’s grotty and cheap in that old-timey British music-hall way, a tradition I don’t have any connection to. That was a fluke though – most of the time these shitty non-songs were quickly forgotten (much like the often-shitty English teams that performed them). Even the better soccer songs don’t do a lot for me. “Waka Waka” is, you know, fine, and I have no love for “Three Lions,” a loser’s song for losers.

So it’s shocking that there does exist a genuinely great soccer song, one so good that you need not follow futbol (as, indeed, I didn’t when I first heard it) to enjoy it. The Brits regularly cite “World in Motion,” England’s theme for Italia ’90 as performed by new wave legends New Order, as the only good World Cup anthem. It holds a special place in the hearts of the English – it went to #1, and the team itself did pretty well that year -- but to me, an American, it was a special hipster pleasure that none of my friends knew about, this amazing perfect pop song where these foreigners sing about their foreign sport and chant their foreign country’s name at the end.

It feels quaint in hindsight to think about it that way now. The beautiful game is no one’s idea of an obscurity, even in America, and also New Order were hardly a hipster band anymore by 1990, being around the peak of their popularity. But though they were no longer underground, they retained their image of detached coolness that made them a strange fit for a big populist football anthem; indeed, they weren’t huge fans of the sport, and were only given the assignment because of random connections between their label and the English FA. They dealt with it by recruiting a comedian (Keith Allen, father of Lily Allen) to help them write the lyrics. The arch indie stars of New Order may not have even understood them. I know I didn’t.

The song begins with audio of a British broadcaster announcing England’s victory in 1966. This would have been an instantly recognizable call to Brits; I didn’t know it. Bernard Sumner implores you in his pasty British way to “express yourself” and “create the space,” because it’s “one on one.” These are all phrases that have specific meanings in soccer; I didn’t know those either. Liverpool F.C. star John Barnes does a guest rap (!) towards the end; I still am only vaguely aware of who that is. In hindsight, I’m amazed how deeply and immediately I loved this song, considering how little context I had.

But the clever thing about the song is that these lyrics don’t sound like they’re about sports. They sound like the great, maximalist dance-pop of that time – “Vogue,” “Rhythm Nation,” big expansive songs built around belief and energy. The entire squad chants “Express yourself,” just a year after Madonna stormed the charts with that title. What’s remarkable is they don’t sound like a bunch of athletes roped into a novelty song – they sound like the crowd at the club, urging you on to greater heights of passion on the dance floor.

But the key lyric is the title – “Love’s got the world in motion and I know what we can do / Love’s got the world in motion and I can’t believe it’s true.” You would not ever, in a million words, read those lyrics and think that they were singing about a competitive sport, where people are divided and ranked and separated. But I feel it. I watched the entire World Cup front to back in 2014 and there was such a joy to it that it’s hard to experience in any other event. The Super Bowl? The Olympics? Nowhere close to the reach of the World Cup. There is something truly amazing about being part of a global phenomenon – tuning into an event where you know that everyone across the world is watching the same thing at the same time. The line that got cut was “E is for England/England starts with an E.” The drug reference (E being the street name for ecstasy, a drug heavily associated with New Order’s brand of dance music) was too obvious to sneak past the gatekeepers. But ecstasy is indeed the right drug, and the right sentiment, for this song. Love’s got the world in motion and I can’t believe it’s true!

If they couldn’t believe it was true, that might be because it wasn’t. The grand irony of course is that it was released at a time when soccer’s reputation was very bad indeed, when love was the furthest thing that people associated with it. Rampant hooliganism through the ‘80s, much of it led by overtly racist gangs, had put a dark pall on the sport throughout Europe; “if this is football, let it die,” read one French headline. (The English fans that showed up to Italy that summer did not make themselves popular.) New Order themselves were not put in motion by love either; relations between Sumner and bassist Peter Cook were at an all-time low, the band was semi-officially on hiatus and working on side projects, and from here on out the band would only record new material or tour for strictly monetary reasons. And even now, as the tide of hooliganism has receded, the sport itself is still easy to love but hard to feel good about. European football is once again dominated with talk of racist abuse (on the pitch and online) as well as the human rights abuses being sanctioned by the global cabal that controls it.

But as they sing: “When something’s good, it’s never gone.” There are reports that the rise of ecstasy as the drug of choice in the early ‘90s is what ended soccer hooliganism in Europe – drunken brawlers replaced with blissed out ravers partying in the streets. This is the joy of sport as we like to imagine it – cheering crowds, no hard feelings, even the losers walking away grateful to just be part of it. “We ain’t no hooligans, this ain’t a football song” Barnes raps at the end. So it isn’t. Football is a sport for champions, this is a song for all.