Article Response: "A Million Hearts"

Hey, I thought you were going to make those lazy writers do the publicity. Oh wait, you wrote this one. ;-)

As for what I think...very good, but my deep thoughts will have to wait for later. I will say that I never quite caught what the hell he was singing about in the verses when I heard it all the time back in 1983 and Johnnie Ray was An Unknown Entity. Our crew just thought it was all about sex.

They STILL play "Celebration" at the Oakland Coliseum after every A's win.

I'm secretively skimming this piece while at work, so the conditions for absorbing it aren't perfect, but I like it, in part because I've DJed my fair share of weddings and "cheap discos" and have thus long been fascinated (I don't mean that in the fake-objective way) by songs like "Eileen" and "Dancing Queen." I'd like to do a piece- actually, I'd rather Tom or someone else just did it for me--about a song with a similar audience response that isn't as easy to defend, though. I'm thinking "Old Time Rock & Roll," which, somewhat understandably, makes many people queasy. (And which, by the way, I was recently told *not* to play at my friend's wedding, but because his cousin came up and asked for it *twice*, I thought, I have to play it, it would simply be rude not to. But I also didn't want to piss off my friend. Because things were going great on the dancefloor, and because people--incl. the groom himself--were getting pretty drunk, he told me to go ahead, and oddly enough, it ended up sounding great again--!--and because it mixed so awesomely with "Electric Avenue" it was one of the evening's BEST moments.)

This article = a pretty good response to/rebuttal of the whole idea of "The Canon." The meaningless of private pop passions (by dictionary definition, I guess) is a whole other ball game - all the obsessives with their numbered/alphabetised CDs who scarcely speak to anyone else, even at work; is their passion diluted or negated by the fact that they don't share it with others?

all the obsessives with their numbered/alphabetised CDs

why is alphabetising CDs seen as the mark of sadness? I have a sufficiently large number of CDs that if I didn't alphabetise them I'd never find the ones I want to listen to.

Or are you saying that having lots of CDs is the mark of sadness?

Actually Nick (do we have to call you N. now?) I was consciously thinking then of the conversational idiom Kevin Rowland will sometimes suddenly slip into, "We're going to have some passion now" or something like that (actually I can't think of many concrete examples of this so maybe I should get rid of it.)

marcello raises an interesting point, regarding the sharing of passion for music with other people vs private passion of those who don't speak to other people. ie - is non-sharing negating passion? i wonder, is is the number of people it is shared with, or the passion with which it is shared?

Well, the article is suggesting that an unshared private passion is less meaningful than a shared one, if only because part of the 'meaning' of music is the social things it enables.

Tom - I see. You're a clever one.

Good article Tom. I agree with a lot of the sentiment, especially the second to last paragraph. Where are you located actually? I think Dexys has always been viewed differently in the US and the UK. Here in the US, they are "Come On Eileen" and that's it. A sublime moment to be sure, but the band did have many others as well ("Geno", "Burn It Down", "Let's Make This Precious," "Until I Believe in My Soul," all of Don't Stand Me Down etc). It's the vagaries of the charts that turn one of those moments into to something shared by millions and leave the others to be discovered privately.

Really good article, Tom -- it's nice to have you back.

The only thing that irritated me about the article is that some of my ideas about pop have been based on "Come On Eileen", but if I ever wanted to write about it now I would look like a Ewing wannabe. Even though the points I would be making would be different - honest!

Great article. (Haven't read it.)