#143, “Too Tough To Die,” Martina Topley-Bird (2003)

150 Favorite Songs: #143, “Too Tough To Die,” Martina Topley-Bird (2003)

There are all sorts of things in music that can evoke feelings. A break in the singer’s voice; the swell of a string section; a piano melody that hits in just the right way; lyrics that feel like they say exactly what you always meant to say, but couldn’t figure out how. This whole series is about those things, but if I’m being honest, more often than not, it’s that last group that really gets me going. For me, the other stuff elevates the feeling behind the words, which is why this isn’t a list of my favorite classical compositions or jazz improvisations or, I dunno, Explosions in the Sky songs.

But I have no fucking clue what “Too Tough To Die” is about. “I always wonder why my mama left town / New Haven ain’t a bag of salt” is one of the more abstract opening lines I can think of. It doesn’t really get more cogent as it goes on. “Living in a cage / make a seven-time daddy / lose his mind to roam” (or maybe it’s Rome?) isn’t exactly clarifying. Not that it matters.

Here’s what I can tell you about “Too Tough To Die”: That bass line makes me feel like I am absolutely invincible. I put it on my headphones while I was walking the dog yesterday and my posture was suddenly perfect, and I walked a half-step faster for the next three minutes and fifty eight seconds. I was, for the duration of the song, the protagonist of a movie, something cool and stylish, and every time the chorus (which is the only part of the song that makes sense, even though it’s just the words “I am / too tough to die” repeated) came around, I knew that it was true: I am, in fact, too tough to die. I was intense and focused and swaggering, because I had this bass line in my ears, just four notes that never quit, that tell me that I will never quit, that propelled me forward because music can do that, too.

Martina Topley-Bird is not particularly famous—not at all famous in the U.S., anyway, was a little more of a star in the U.K., but even that was twenty years ago—but “Too Tough To Die” is immortal, if you know about it. I’m not the only one who thinks so; the song may not have been a big hit, but you can hear covers of it by the Twilight Singers and Neneh Cherry where they grab that bass line with both hands and commit to it, and you can tell that it makes them feel something, too. It’s nice, to imagine yourself in a club with other people who all swagger down the street to the same four bass notes that most other people don’t know about. Now you know it, too.

I love that there are parts to me that I don’t have the ability to access on my own that can get switched on because of a bass line. That when I hear it, everything I’m doing immediately gets more focused and purposeful. It doesn’t even matter what it is—if I’m building a model, that’s gonna be the most intense Millennium Falcon ever. There are pieces to all of us that we can’t just turn on, that only get unlocked when we encounter the right stimulus. For me, music does that, and “Too Tough To Die” is one of those songs that does it. For you, I dunno, I guess it could be something else entirely. Maybe you smell the right Yankee Candle and you turn into Popeye. But there’s magic in the low end for me, and I would never have known how to tap into it if Martina Topley-Bird and her collaborators on this song hadn’t found it.