Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

it at least once a show.
    I also began hitting up friends for musical tips. I was a resident adviser that year (official hall motto:
Nothing That Could Get Me Sued)
and one of my frosh—a Beverly Hills hipster—slipped me the debut album by a Scottish quartet called Del Amitri, recorded when the lead singer was about twelve. It was (and is) a perfect pop record: a brisk journey into romantic ruin. It wasn’t enough that I loved Del Amitri—or the Femmes or the Saints or Phranc—I needed everyone to love them.
    Why? Why wasn’t it enough for me to enjoy these fine musicians? Why did it immediately become
my
job to spread the good news? It’s a question that plumbs the heart of the Drooling Fanatic. There’s the genetic explanation, of course. And the younger-brother-chip-on-my-shoulder thing. But my compulsion had a tangled erotic aspect, too. I wanted to feel a certain kind of possession. Like any crush, it was partly about the narcissism of my own desire. And it was more thanthat. I wanted other people to feel what I felt, inside, when those songs came on. Deep down I saw them as a solution to the crisis of my loneliness.
    Reluctant Exegesis:
“(I Bless the Rains Down in) Africa”
    I said before that there is no objectively “bad” music. I must now amend that statement. In so doing, let me cite Duke Ellington, who once famously declared that “there are only two kinds of music: good music and bad music. And by bad music I mean specifically the song ‘(I Bless the Rains Down in) Africa’ by Toto.” Ellington died two years before Toto formed as a band, which speaks to his prescience.
    What makes “(I Bless the Rains Down in) Africa” so bad? Mostly, it’s the lyrics. Also, the instrumentation, the vocals, and that virulent jazz-lite melody, which, despite the manifest wretchedness of everything I’ve just mentioned, means that you are no doubt conjuring the song even as you read this—those hypnotic banks of synthesizer and phony “tribal”-sounding drums—and without at all meaning to, sort of … grooving to “(I Bless the Rains Down in) Africa,” sort of digging it, sort of bathing in the buttery memory of sixth grade or tenth grade and hand jobs and lip gloss and really actually kind of remembering, or rediscovering, how much you
love
“(I Bless the Rains Down in) Africa” even as you’re hating yourself for this love. It’s complicated.
    So are the lyrics:
    I hear the drums echoing tonight
But she hears only whispers of some quiet conversation
She’s coming in 12:30 flight
The moonlit wings reflect the stars that guide me towards salvation
    Our hero is waiting for a female whose plane arrives just after midnight. Got it. This seems to place him in or around an airport, the sort of airport within earshot of drums. He can see the wings of the plane, which are lit by the moon and also, curiously, able to reflect stars.
    I stopped an old man along the way
Hoping to find some long forgotten words or ancient melodies
He turned to me as if to say, “Hurry boy, it’s waiting there for you”
    Suddenly our hero is no longer waiting around some poorly soundproofed airport. No, he’s on a journey, presumably outside. He encounters an unidentified old man. Contrary to the dangling modifier, it is the speaker, not the old man, who is hoping to find some long-forgotten words or ancient melodies. The old man will supply these, because the old man is African and all Africans, by definition, possess ancient melodies. The old African then turns to our hero. It is a complex physical gesture, one that manages to convey a vital and perhaps ancient truth:
our hero must hurry!
Why? Because “it’s waiting there” for him. What is “it”? Where is “there”? Only the old African knows for sure.
    It’s gonna take a lot to drag me away from you
There’s nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do
I bless the rains down in Africa
Gonna take some time to do the things we never had
    We now have