Every weekday I suffer through a snippet of easy listening '70s music in the bathroom at work (read the overly elaborate setup here). Why not turn a mild annoyance into an opportunity to educate myself, and yourself, by the transitive property, about the easy listening music of an earlier generation?
Of all the genres of music that have made me reflect on the insane diversity of human artistic expression, from Insane Clown Posse cover bands to people who play the lute, late '70s soft rock must be the strangest of all.
I just don't get that stuff. How did the Western world get from the guitar/drum/bass/piano rock and roll of the 1960s to the hideous mellow stylings of Californiated easy listening stuff that seemed designed for senior citizens of the future? I can picture David Geffen thinking, "Hey, the kids love this crap now, and they'll love it in fifty years when they're hiring people to get them to the toilet in the morning".
I refer specifically to Player.
Player are kind of known for one song - 1977's "Baby Come Back," (it is not, as The Bloggess recently insisted, by Hall & Oates). Well, they're not so much known as vaguely remembered. They're kind of a stand-in for all those bands that had one or two surprise hits, then sort of did stuff for a while. You know, stuff - an album here, a side project there, and the inevitable reunion album (1995's Lost In Reality, ) that produces absolutely nothing of note. That's Player: an abstract glob of musical effort smeared across the calendar from the late '70s to the mid '90s.
Facebook visitors: please visit my weblog to view the video portion. And by 'video portion' I mean a bunch of smooth California rockers with puffy hair and glittery vests.
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