"All of This and Nothing" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.
Some weeks the title of the post gives away the song. This is probably one of the most obvious: there's only one Logical Song.
It's from Supertramp, who were huge in the 1970s but are one of those bands (pretty common in the '60s and '70s, now that I come to think about it: Three Dog Night, Grand Funk Railroad, Bread, Bad Company) who dropped out of visibility almost immediately when they stopped making music.
So I'm calling this one Famous - it was Top 10 in the US & UK, and the biggest hit from a then-major band - but you might have to have been alive in 1979 to agree with me.
It's one of the great classic rock "what's the point of all of it?" songs, coming at the end of the supposedly-happy '70s and asking the musical question
Won't you please, please tell me what we've learned?
I know it sounds absurd
Please tell me who I am
I love the way it's full of half-rhymes and almost-rhymes, piles of words that sound like "logical" in one way or another, just words on words on words about what life as an adult is like - and that wistful question of whether it has to be that way.
But then they sent me away to teach me how to be sensible
Logical, oh, responsible, practical
The instrumentation is also more than a little odd for rock - two keyboards drive most of the song, it starts with that iconic maraca-shake sound, and there's a prominent saxophone solo in the middle. Well, it was the late '70s, at the end of a long run of prog-rock doing quirkier and quirkier things with the form.
And some thing never do change:
watch what you say or they'll be calling you a radical
A liberal, oh, fanatical, criminal
1 comment:
Whenever I hear this song, I think of my high school English teacher, who used the lyrics as an example to get us to actually listen to poetry and anaylze it.
Good choice!
(This was the early '80's, so she brought a turntable to class to play it...)
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