How can you mend a broken heart when listening to the Bee Gees?
My library's CD collection continues to be a source of enlightenment and, occasionally, astonishment.
Case in point: until I'd listened to the Bee Gees' Their Greatest: The Record double-disc collection (2001), I didn't realize how much of their stuff from the 1960s and early 1970s I'd heard before, even if I never knew the titles (as in their first international hit, "New York Mining Disaster 1941" and their early disco-era hit, "Fanny (Be Tender With My Love)"). I also didn't realize how goddamned depressing much of their oeuvre is, even the nominally up-tempo dance numbers.
I mean, seriously: that anybody could churn out such a string of chart-topping records -- basically tracks 1 through 13 on the first disc -- whose cumulative, if not individual, effect threatens to be as potent as that of "Gloomy Sunday," is nothing short of in-frickin'-credible. And while, when the disco starts, it sounds at first as though someone finally changed their meds, upon a closer listen many of those anthologized-to-death songs manage to convey the idea of someone dancing into his open grave. "Love So Right" is an obvious weeper, but "Stayin' Alive" is not the snappy number that many imagined upon first seeing a fantastically young John Travolta strutting down a Brooklyn street at the beginning of Saturday Night Fever. (I still get a chuckle remembering a cover story interview with Travolta in one of the men's magazines -- I think it was GQ -- after his career revival courtesy of Pulp Fiction but before his career suicide thanks to his vanity project Battlefield Earth, wherein the author of the piece described Travolta as walking "as though his nuts were on ball bearings." Of the many, many things that I will never accomplish at this late date in my life, that has a special place of honor.)
I suspect that even a superficially zesty number like "You Should Be Dancing" has more in common with a Śaiva urging on the world's end -- grooving on the rubble, in Jerry Rubin's parlance -- than with any real joie de vivre.
Thank sweet suffering Marsyas that I didn't have a collection of their early stuff when I was a teenager....
Case in point: until I'd listened to the Bee Gees' Their Greatest: The Record double-disc collection (2001), I didn't realize how much of their stuff from the 1960s and early 1970s I'd heard before, even if I never knew the titles (as in their first international hit, "New York Mining Disaster 1941" and their early disco-era hit, "Fanny (Be Tender With My Love)"). I also didn't realize how goddamned depressing much of their oeuvre is, even the nominally up-tempo dance numbers.
I mean, seriously: that anybody could churn out such a string of chart-topping records -- basically tracks 1 through 13 on the first disc -- whose cumulative, if not individual, effect threatens to be as potent as that of "Gloomy Sunday," is nothing short of in-frickin'-credible. And while, when the disco starts, it sounds at first as though someone finally changed their meds, upon a closer listen many of those anthologized-to-death songs manage to convey the idea of someone dancing into his open grave. "Love So Right" is an obvious weeper, but "Stayin' Alive" is not the snappy number that many imagined upon first seeing a fantastically young John Travolta strutting down a Brooklyn street at the beginning of Saturday Night Fever. (I still get a chuckle remembering a cover story interview with Travolta in one of the men's magazines -- I think it was GQ -- after his career revival courtesy of Pulp Fiction but before his career suicide thanks to his vanity project Battlefield Earth, wherein the author of the piece described Travolta as walking "as though his nuts were on ball bearings." Of the many, many things that I will never accomplish at this late date in my life, that has a special place of honor.)
I suspect that even a superficially zesty number like "You Should Be Dancing" has more in common with a Śaiva urging on the world's end -- grooving on the rubble, in Jerry Rubin's parlance -- than with any real joie de vivre.
Thank sweet suffering Marsyas that I didn't have a collection of their early stuff when I was a teenager....