Sitting in the Portuguese restaurant with brothers John and Pete, I had no choice but to listen to the easy-listening/soft-rock music that was being piped-in. We were in a private room—not by choice but because it was late on a Wednesday night and the only people in the joint were either at the bar or worked there or both—and there was a fire burning and plenty of, in fact perhaps too much, great food and copious amounts of Chilean wine as well as the sparkling repartee for which the family is known far and wide. Okay, there were mainly a lot of dirty jokes. It was an awfully pleasant scene.
But I kept finding myself noticing the music, frequently against my will. Cheesy pop songs followed by that nasty creation "lite jazz" and topped with a generous dollop of soft-core r&b. Two songs in particular stood out from this hideous aural concoction: Debbie Boone’s "You Light Up My Life," a song so inconsequential that its status as the number one song of the year 1977 is almost impossible to wrap your head around. What was it that so appealed to people? It’s not the worst song ever by a long shot, but there’s just no there there, so what can possibly account for its gigantic success? Inexplicable.
The other stand-out of the night was Peter Gabriel’s "In Your Eyes." One of his finest songs, it’s always nice to encounter it again, even when surrounded by fluff, treacle and assorted detritus. I couldn’t help but wonder, though, whether proximity to Kenny G and Al Jarreau can somehow have a deleterious effect on a song. Surely it can have an effect on how one perceives that song. Hopefully the effects aren’t permanent. You can’t blame the Mona Lisa for being hung in a garish museum. You can just hope that people will still be able to appreciate it for the great work of art it is, even if it’s surrounded by paint-by-numbers versions of The Last Supper and a bunch of sad clowns holding drooping sunflowers.
Comments