Word: songs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...blame Bobby McFerrin for his stupid song that everyone quotes when telling me to be less tense. I'm worrying; I'm not happy; thank you very much. I blame post-thesis seniors who try to out-do one another explaining how relaxed they are. And I blame my parents, who have given me both the genetic and environmental predisposition to get extremely, extremely tense...
...John Travolta, sideburns, Billy beer, pet rocks, Jim Jones, Starsky and Hutch, macrame, fern bars, Leif Garrett, Dynamite magazine, Craig Morton, Carter Country, Orca the Killer Whale, the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders, Debby Boone, Pong, the Captain and Tennille, gas lines, or the movie Ice Castles and its execrable theme song...
Thus the local song that boasts "Samoa, there's no place like you" rings all too true for some of the palagis, or foreigners, on the island. At American Samoa Community College, Philip Grant gamely leads Laborday Fatali and a group of other flamboyantly named students through a discussion of Rousseau and Romanticism, only occasionally thrown off by a modern sensibility ("What does self-serving mean?" "Well, the gas station is self- service"). Yet Grant, one of those gypsy scholars who move from country to country, finds Samoa considerably more alien than his last posting, in Beirut. "In Lebanon...
...demonstrations two years ago precipitated his downfall. The marchers, divided into well-organized ranks according to their school, chanted and waved red and white banners. When they tired of singing the Internationale and the national anthem, the students launched into homemade ditties. To the tune of the French song Frere Jacques, they warbled in Chinese, "Lying to the people, lying to the people, very strange, very strange...
What gives the songs their staying power is their instant emotional familiarity, the way they seem to carry so much of Snow's emotional freight with no strain. The record's last song, Cardiac Arrest, is a kick, a stops-out rocker that dares to be a little goofy, that cuts the listener a little welcome slack. Even here, though, Snow is laughing at the expense of a mangled heart. The women Snow sings about put themselves at perpetual high risk. I'm Your Girl, the record's midpoint and one of its high points, sounds at first like another...