Saturday, February 23, 2008

In Which I Am an Idiot

In deference to the age of my car, I try to play only music tapes produced before 1995 when traveling; this isn’t difficult, since that’s around the time everyone stopped making cassettes, anyway. Recently I picked up a few tapes at the Goodwill, including the eponymous Collective Soul album, Fine Young Cannibals' The Raw and the Cooked, and Peter Gabriel’s So.

If you’ve read my earlier posts, you can probably guess that I’ve been listening to Peter Gabriel lately—in fact, obsessively and manically would be other apt adverbs. I knew practically nothing about Gabriel, personally, before popping this tape into my car stereo, but that doesn’t excuse the level of ignorance to which I’m about to confess.

When I heard “Red Rain,” the first song on the album, my immediate reaction was “Wow, this sounds like something Phil Collins would produce.”

Yeah. It does. Maybe because Peter Gabriel was the frontman for Genesis, Alicia. Maybe because Phil Collins was the Genesis drummer. Maybe that’s why.

At least I heard the link, though—that might count for something when I get to the chic-but-not-too-chic gates of hipness heaven.

Post-script: I can't get over "Red Rain," actually--I keep having to listen to it despite only owning it on tape and being forced to listen on the ugliest, most lazily-assembled "casette personal stereo" on the planet--especially the part at the end where he sings "I'm begging you": I'm like, Peter, you had me at "I cannot make a single sound as you scream."

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