Doling out another single after the appropriately titled “Patience,” Tame Impala has seen fit to bring us another one-word track, “Borderline,” which Kevin Parker first debuted on Saturday Night Live‘s March 30th show in a more germinal lyrical form. Now, in its official incarnation, the motif, recently repurposed by Ariana Grande on Sweetener with the same title (an undoubted homage to one of her oft cited heroines, Madonna), “Borderline” firmly establishes itself as yet another heartache track detailing the woes of being caught between a rock and a hard place (that hard place being the “City of Angels”).
Yes, as is always the case with a song called “Borderline,” Parker refers to a relationship at the brink of its final stages, rueing, “We’re on the borderline/Dangerously far and all forgiven/There’s gonna be a fight/Gonna be a price to pay on Monday (if you and I get comfortable).” Still not learning from his past mistakes, Parker will inevitably do just that, whether he’s talking about a new love turned old or the city of Los Angeles itself, which he refers to numerous times throughout the song, where he recorded the music. Incidentally, Madonna filmed the video for her OG 1983 “Borderline” in L.A. despite being ensconced in her then extremely New York-centric period, with many key shots showcasing the 1930s-built Sixth Street Viaduct–soon to be transformed into a multimillion dollar marvel called The Ribbon of Light.
When it comes to L.A., however, no such ribbon of light seems to exist for Parker, who admits, “L.A. really messed me up/And it isn’t cut and dry.” The fact that he was in town during the illustrious Woolsey Fire likely didn’t heighten his experience so much as dampen it (more than the firefighters did the fire), hence the lyric, “There I go/Quite a show for a loner in L.A./Askin’ how I managed to end up in this place/And I couldn’t get away.” Nor could he get away from the inevitable rabbit hole of getting in too deep with another person, an act of courage that almost always ends unfavorably. Accordingly, it doesn’t feel overly dramatic for Parker to liken the end of love to a biblical rapture, explaining, “Caught between the tides of pain and rapture/Then I saw the time/Watched it speedin’ by like a train.” This specific phrase is in ironic contrast to the line in “Patience” that finds him stating in wonderment, “Has it really been that long? Did I count the days wrong?”
Madonna tends to ask the same thing after losing track of how many days she lends out to a douchey yuppie “fashion photographer” upon being discovered near the bridge by a Paul McCartney lookalike in a manner similar to how she got scouted on the street for the role of Susan in Desperately Seeking Susan. Despite her boyfriend’s misogynistic jealousy and possessiveness over the moneymaking allure she has, Madonna goes through with the job offer nonetheless, which turns out to be posing in several dubious outfits that rightfully end up making her lash out against the Paul McCartney lookalike photographer by spray painting his car after doing the same to one of the walls he relegated her to for the photoshoot. His bitch boy reaction (clearly, she was subconsciously testing how much he valued material over her) sends her right back into the arms of her Latino boyfriend, who looks all shiny and new again after spending too much time riding a white pencil dick. But there’s no doubt that her original bloke will push her to the borderline once more when given enough of a chance.
This, of course, differs slightly from Parker’s own “Borderline” quandaries, but all in all, both his and Madonna’s sense of mental fracturedness stem from the geographical energy of L.A. For in most instances, the borderline relationships people seem to have nowadays are with cities anyway.
