Everything Looks Better In Black Aad White

The Con

Excuse me for going rock geek/music critic all over you but hey, it’s my birthday and I’ll rock geek/music critic all over you if I want to, but I spent all of the 29th looking for the perfect tune(s) for a 43rd birthday and I came up short.

After an all day listening fest, I came up with a few Pere Ubu tunes – Modern Dance, Waiting For Mary, Final Solution, the usual Velvet and Dylan plus Bird, Sonny Boy Williamson, Foetus, Husker Du, Miles and the other usual suspects but nothing fit.

However, after a long laughter filled conversation with Patricia Carter, one of my oldest dearest friends, things began to get clear.  We discussed (among other things) my hobby (if you will) of walking through cities – city hiking to coin a phrase.  It was after we hung up I realized a song, this song, this version of this song, Paul Simon’s ‘Kodachrome‘ was what I’ve been looking for.

In the original, the last lyric before the Outro chorus states ‘everything looks WORSE in black and white.’  But in the version above, the lyric says ‘everything looks BETTER in black and white’ and that is the key turn of phrase/simple pop song truth for my mood on this my 43rd birthday.

And it is a truth that can only be found in rock/pop lyrics; which is why the secrets of life’s mysteries can be found in those words as well as the liner notes of LP’s of the same era.  Certain things in this world, the various loves of your life, places seen so sharply, people met on barstools, are so vivid as if in Technicolor on first sight yet seem distant but close years later.  So I wonder how I’m going to see LA after my deployment is over and in later years – not nearly as sharply as I see it now but certainly more lovingly.

Is this vastly over thought?  Of course but by trade I’m a music critic and thus it is my purview to over think ANYTHING.  Besides you only turn 43 once or eight or nine times if the Hindu’s and Buddhists are right…