I distinctly remember being sick of “More Than a Feeling” in high school. Why did we have to listen to a 20 year-old song every day? Even if we refused the possibility that any music recorded in the last two decades could be worth playing on the radio, I wondered, why play this one? It’s rhythmless and shrill; the chorus is weak, and the refrain compares the most abstract concept imaginable to…nothing. Hearing “More Than a Feeling” virtually every day on KGGO, at that time the only rock station in Des Moines, felt like a warning from an older generation that they would never relinquish culture, even if that meant culture had to stop. I imagined a man with a cigar at the radio station, angrily asking why we needed new music when “More Than a Feeling” was right here. Eventually these people would lay off, though. Surely, once “More Than a Feeling” was 40 years old, I would no longer hear it in car washes and burger joints. How little I knew. “More Than a Feeling” turned 40 last year, and it was the fifth-most played song across 25 classic rock radio stations in June.
Category Archives: Music
In landmark ruling, Judge Dread sentences rude boy to 400 years
By the time you read this, I’ll be famous. I assume that everyone else on the internet also spent the last few weeks listening to Prince Buster, and this blog post about his influence on The Specials will go viral instantly. Probably, the Combat! blog server has already crashed, and this essay is now hosted by NASA. In case you live in Iraq or something and don’t know the central elements of western culture: Prince Buster was a musician during the first wave of Jamaican ska in the 1960s. The Specials were a band during the 2-Tone ska revival in late-seventies London. They relate to each other much as the individual relates to the culture he or she inherits, echoing Ortega y Gasset’s construction of modernity. Video after the jump.
A thing I like in dance music
You don’t live alone for eight years and not develop an interest in dance music. That would be weird. Just as my downstairs neighbor’s life as a law student leaves him free to watch his favorite movie, Trains & Explosions, from 4pm to 1am every day, my life as a hermit allows me to listen to the Soulwax Shibuya remix of “Daft Punk Is Playing at My House.” Also there is dancing. Such behavior is healthy and normal, provided that I listen to the good kind of dance music and not Ke$ha or Technotronic or whatever.