View Single Post
  #1  
Old 01-06-2020, 04:52 PM
David's Avatar
David David is offline
Addicted Ledgie
 
Join Date: Apr 2002
Location: California
Posts: 14,904
Default Bands You Hate Except For One Song

Boston’s a band I’ve never taken to—lots of galumphing songwriting from the perspective of pimply teenage boys and mechanistic arrangements with all the surprise squeezed out of them. Boston was a business idea, not a musical one. Everything about them seemed fabricated—one of the founders attended MIT, and everything he did for the band was akin to a scripting language or parsing module. Still, they sold millions, so what do I know?

But there’s one song that has been a favorite of mine since the day I heard it in 1978, when I bought the follow-up to the debut. It’s the title song, Don’t Look Back. Looking at it soberly, it’s really just as corporate-phony as the rest of the Boston catalogue—but it’s perfectly phony: it’s the apex of everything it aspires to, because it grabs you by the prerogatives for six or seven minutes and doesn’t relent. None of it is genuine in the sense that, say, Beat on the Brat or 1979 is genuine, but there isn’t a single wrong turn or bad punch-in throughout the entire track. The whole articulate song is poised far above the typical bad taste of AOR cock-rock. Even the turn-around in the final minute is already legendary while you’re hearing it for the first time, like a Phil Spector production with the Ronettes. You can try to fight it and reject it as shlock but you’ll fail: you’ll be singing along, tapping your feet, shaking whichever body part you generally shake. You’re transported all the way to exaltation. By the final dying chord, you’re spent. In 1978, this was about as “epic” as experiences bought through Ticketron got.

Of any bands you hate or ignore, is there one song you just can’t dislodge from your brain?
__________________

moviekinks.blogspot.com
Reply With Quote
.