A few years back, the resident single filer and I combined literary forces to try and fill the Internet with the one thing it was truly built for. A taco blog. About burritos.
I know. And yet, somehow, we're not millionaires.
Over the few-month existence of this project, we'd each go out and consume our favorite tube-shaped meal and talk about the experience. Bad photos were uploaded and (mostly) good food was ingested. It was fun (and filling), though sadly we had to abandon it after a short amount of time. The fame got to be just too much. Oh, wait, not fame, my weight. That got to be too much. Right, I knew something did.
However, the short-lived yet delicious dalliance of this adventure didn't abscond the virtual earth without leaving one lasting, all-time awesome idea behind. A taco advent calendar.
That's right, you heard me. Tacos, for twenty-five straight days in December.
And again, we're somehow still not millionaires!!!!! Crazy right? I don't get it either.
Our mission for that one, remarkable month, was to eat something taco-esque every single day up until Santa made his non-taco related arrival (what a loser, that guy). Surprisingly (at least to me), this wasn't quite as easy as I thought it would be. The daily grind quickly ground up familiar and normal food-type combinations. To keep ourselves invested and interested, we both had to get creative and find new and different things to fill our gaping tortillas as the meals went on. And, yes, a PB&J taco is still a taco, thank you very much.
Fortunately, I had some help. My wife, without sound reason (nor a particularly lucrative life insurance policy) supported this ridiculous plan. She made some very tasty tacos a few times for me during that December to help keep the ball rolling towards the freedom that Boxing Day would provide. After having a legit tasty dinner, I would sit down at my laptop and hammer out a screed about that particular feast to our tens of readers. Er, ten readers. This is where, the most, eh, challenging part of the overall thing came in.
Let's return to the present for a moment. If you, gentle reader, have taken the time to read even a half-dozen of my posts within A Single Breakdown, a few things. First, thank you! Second, what's wrong with you? Third, thank you thank you thank you!!!
Fourth, well, I'm guessing that you might have noticed that I tend to go off-topic on occasion. Or, well, on pretty much every occasion. I try to sit down and write about the thing I'm trying to write about, but, jeez, some other thing almost always tends to comes out. I don't know why. That's just what happens.
So, in the case of taco time (not Taco Time), my better half would concoct an advent-qualifying delight and then, quite reasonably, expect to read about it afterwards. What she got instead was a one-sentence mention of a homemade dinner followed by 500+ words about whatever weird offramp my brainage felt like taking at that moment (very probably something about a cartoon character. Or beer. Or hockey).
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| Hmm, that's on the nose |
So, why do I bring all of this up now? Well, this here bloggy blog is supposed to be about the words of each week's assigned number one song. Uh huh. Let's just take look at the topic of the last three weeks of posts.
- Last Week - 80's sitcom clip shows
- Prior Week - Parody songs
- Prior Week - Favorite Monkee tunes
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| Sorry, no, not the topic of the song. But what if it was? |
Let's talk words! Don Henley words, to be more specific. This week's number one hit comes to us from the early 80's. It was a time when the media sensationalized celebrities and ignored real news for hot takes and headline-grabbing nonsense. Good thing we're past all of that now.
Ahem.
This song is, in a way, tricky to parse lyrically. It isn't written from the point of view of the songwriter, but of another person. In this case, an empty-headed and callous news reporter. The tune is telling a story from that standpoint. And, from that perspective, it is quite similar to an even more famous chart topper that we happened to look at last September.
Money for Nothing by Dire Straits was also a tune built to be sung by "someone else". This hit, released just a couple of years after Dirty Laundry, follows the same technique of spewing awful thoughts and actions from the first-person vantage point. It's more of a literary method than one that you see in songwriting. However, I do think it works pretty well and makes for an interesting record.
But, like the ol' refrigerator-mover anthem, it becomes tricky to truly review the verses on an individual level. This is a tale being told, meaning that we need to consider it as a whole, and not by looking at individual lines. I think that's required because that's what makes the song what it is.
If Don Henley hadn't taken himself out of the narration, I think this creation goes down the drain quickly. Hearing a character talk with a cold mentality of exploiting people and disasters? Sounds great. Listening to a hugely famous musician bemoan the same thing? Pfft, lame. Nobody cares Don, you're a millionaire, now climb off your high horse and into that flatbed Ford or whatever.
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| Never having seen The Eagles live, I have to say, looks like a weird show |
All that said, there is one part of this release that we need to take a closer look at. A really, really close look. Like, super-magnified. Why? Well, it is so run into the ground, you just can't see it with the naked eye. That is, the kick em's.
Dear god Henley. You must have absolutely LOVED that stinkin' phrase. Why else would you do this? Seriously, let's crunch the numbers. In this song, the following phrases are spoken this many times:
Kick em' when they're up - 24 times!
Kick em' when they're down - 23 times!
Kick em' all around - 3 times
Kick em' when they're stiff - 2 times
I just...no. This cannot possibly be considered a good song (or good songwriting) with this sort of repetition. I don't care how clever the rest of it is. Sorry, this is just shotty and lazy. There's only one thing that can be repeated this many times and still be entertaining.
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| Sideshow Bob stepping on rakes. Only this, Don. |
FINAL THOUGHTS
This might be a tad too simplistic, but this song is good until it isn't. It's like chewing a piece of really sugary gum. At first, it's great and you're really digging it. But then you keep chewing and chewing and it just keeps going and going and you become so done with it that you can't get it out of your mouth fast enough.
Perhaps that's a bit too negative of a review, but it's frustrating to see an interesting concept and watch an artist take it apart into (no less than) 52 individual, duplicate, annoying bits. Is that fair? I think so, as I'm not just doing this blog for...kicks.
No, I didn't just say that.
You see, this is why I don't write about the thing I'm supposed to write about. It's your fault, expectations! Next week, tacos, whether the song is about them or not.
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