Surprised to be face-to-face with a world so alive! “Venus,” from Television.
Happy new year’s eve, reader. This seems like a good song for the occasion; I can’t think of a time in the last 10 years that this song hasn’t been close by — at the dawn of this decade, my garage band was rehearsing jokey versions of it in Dave’s basement; my uncle bestowed his vinyl copy of Marquee Moon to the Sturdevant Brothers Vinyl Trust early on; I took it with me to Pittsburgh, to Minneapolis, to New York, all across the Midwest and East Coast; had numerous copies of it stolen, burned, taped, illegally downloaded in most popular formats; yelled along with it during parties and solitary college studio painting sessions and road trips; made it a part of dumb inside jokes (my girlfriend in college thought the lyric was “Richard said, ‘hey, man, let’s dress up like cats, think of what we could do’”); accused lesser bands of sounding like it, used it as a reference point when talking about anything else going on in guitar-based music. It’s not even a song from this particular decade, but it sounds like this particular decade to me, anyway.
Plus, the way the guitar break after the solo just seems to sparkle in a way that makes me think of falling confetti and champagne glasses clinking and nighttime in the winter. Again: happy new year. I hope yours is good to you.
