Milky's "Just The Way You Are" is Mawkish, Sentimental Trash...and I Love It

Defending the Indefensible is a semi-regular series which sees us trying to find merit in the abject, the terrible, and the deathly dull. We don't believe that there's such a thing as "guilty pleasure", so this series sets out to prove that even the most shocking and schlocky corners of dance music can find a home in somebody's heart.

The thing about sentimentality is that sentimentality has an undeservedly terrible reputation. It's a perennial relegation favourite in the premier league of human emotion, down there with the seven deadly sins and the hollow feeling one experiences after realizing that one's actually already eaten the Rolo yoghurt one was saving for a post-work treat. We think of sentimentality, and the sentimental, as weak, as facile, as pointless and regressive. We see the unashamedly sentimental as cloying, mawkish, and ultimately embarrassing.

The truth about sentimentality is that sentimentality is actually, get this…great. As a force for creativity, and as a mental state, the sentimental is wonderful, and as valid as anything else out there. To be sentimental, to be truly sentimental, is to experience a kind of freedom. And freedom, as you don't really need to be told, comes at a premium these days.

Being drawn to the sentimental, in life, in art, takes one down strange paths. Paths of pathos, if you will. You become drawn to end of the pier shows and game show repeats, saucy postcards and Cilla Black. You exist – culturally — in a space of self-absorption and knowing-semi-sadness. You become Morrissey, basically. And pardon my bulbous salutations but no one wants that.

Club culture's relationship to sentimentality isn't immediately obvious but it's there and it seeps through everything at the moments you're least expecting it to.

"Just the Way You Are" by Milky is the most underrated record in the history of dance music. Seriously. You can keep that Raresh white label you found in a wheelie bin in a Bucharest side street a few years ago. Sod the Young Marco masterpiece you play to your nonplussed mates every single time you come back from the pub or the club or the park or the shops. They're nothing compared to the sheer majesty of a Go-Betweens sampling Italian landfill-house bit of dross from 2002.

While it only reached no.8 in the UK charts — nestled between "Romeo Dunn" by Romeo and eurodance sensation Mad'House's version of "Like a Prayer" — it's forever sat at the top of the pops in my heart. It's brilliant, elegiac, endlessly replayable and, most importantly, incredibly, incredibly sentimental. It's sodden with easily accessible, easily understandable emotional heft. It archly, but deftly, pulls at the heartstrings, yanking at them, tugging at them, snapping them in fucking two.

The sentimentality I'm talking about here, the sentimentality that stalks its way around dancefloors, Saturdays after Fridays, is ever so slightly different from the sentimental pangs that often waltz hand in hand with the dreadful duo of irony and nostalgia. This isn't watching old Des O'Connor clips on a rainy Sunday in November sentimentality, nor is is the kind of sentimentality that turns genuine enjoyment and nuanced appreciation of something into the kind of "hey, wasn't everything so much better when it was all Fred Astaire films and Findus crispy pancakes" bland-romanticism peddled by the likes of Stuart Macconie and other broadcasters paid to retrieve the memories all of us share as part of our collective cultural consciousness. It's darker than that. It's sentimentality as a way of understanding that all things are imbued with a sense of an ending.

To go to the club is to accept that the club'll shut at some point, be it that night just for that night, or that night forever. To dance is to accept to that the dancing'll come to an end. To be stood, with a group of mates, all on the edge of total unthinking ecstasy at 2am, is to accept that in 12 hours time you'll all be stuck to a sofa feeling very sorry for yourselves with overpriced pizza and ratty joints and intense self-loathing for company. Club culture is an impermanent structure that can't and won't sustain itself. Each year tens of thousands of records emerge and dissipate instantly, never loved by anyone, never becoming what they always wanted to be: a beloved object. It's hard not to feel sentimental about the dogeared and the tatty, the (un)careworn and the ratty.

Sentimentality is a (lurking) reason as to why we go clubbing time and time again even when we've told ourselves that it's pointless, even when we accept that clubbing, as an activity, as a pastime, as a hobby, as a means of differentiating ourselves from the herd we're terrified of falling into, is utterly without meaning. The club, it seems, is one of the few spaces going where outright sentimentality is not only tolerated, but is perversely pivotal to the entire experience. Think about it: where else, other than the cinema which is an entirely passive place and space, is geared towards engendering a totality of experience in the way the club does? The club, as an idea and an actuality, only exists through participation and togetherness. An empty club is the saddest sight in the world. A club that's heaving, a club that's you and everyone you knows favourite place in the world is the most sentimental place in the world too.

We should be careful at this point to not confuse sentimentality with simple sadness. Sadness is hollow, sadness suppurates the soul, sadness leaves us feeling, well, sad. Sentimentality is slightly different: a sentimental feeling is an overflowing of feeling, a glorious longing, an attachment that defies rationality. That irrationality is the same irrationality that draws us to certain clubs or records or record labels or DJs.

You can get sentimental over anything. It could be something that seems to naturally lend itself to those warm-bath-and-fresh-sheets feelings sadlad autumnal house like "The Meaning" by Ron Trent and Chez Damier, or Tobias Thomas and Michael Mayer's "Uberwiesen", or Superpitcher's remix of "Along the Wire" by Lawrence or "So Weit Wie Noch Nie" by Jurgen Paape. It could be something elevates and enervates you beyond where you find yourself now. It could be something that takes you back to places you wish you'd never been and hope to never find yourself again. It takes you back to yourself. It takes you outside of yourself.

This is the thing: you can get sentimental over pop music or classical or free jazz or gamelan or grindcore, but club music is music made to be heard in a certain somewhere and when that somewhere isn't there, there's a vacuum, an emotional void, a distance, and we fill that distance, that void, that vaccum with sentimental feelings.

Milky's song makes me feel sentimental about things I've never experienced, which, arguably, is the height of sentimentality. This form of the sentimental — sentimentality as a process of escaping the self — is the most interesting. In evoking both longing for that which one's never experienced while simultaneously tricking the longer into believing, briefly, that they have experienced it, the sentimental piece of art becomes the transcendental piece of art. When I listen to "Just The Way You Are" I'm transported to moonlit nights in shoreline bars, I'm whisked away on a moped down a fuzzy hillside somewhere south of Umbira, I'm there, in my head, I'm there. I've been manipulated, coerced, tricked. I don't care.

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