love passion power and Chicago

My wife put on her Best of Chicago album (the more recent one) again just now. She's been listening to it a lot lately, I'm not sure why.

I'm a fan of Chicago. I have several albums stored somewhere across the Pacific, about half of their albums from Chicago Transit Authority to around Chicago XI. Some are rotting on tape, unfortunately.

To me, Chicago VII was the pinnacle of their work, and I still think so. Unfortunately, they backed away from their experiments in fusion jazz after that. Mixed with their high-fructose pop output, I'd have liked them to put out some more albums with the heavy fusion influence shown in VII. (Maybe it would have been hard for them to do that without Terry Kath -- the chemistry of a group changes when a member is taken away like that.)

(I notice that Stone of Sisyphus was released around five years ago while I wasn't looking.)

So we're listening to Chicago, somewhere before the tune "Stay the Night" in the play order, and I'm thinking that Chicago, except for V and VII, is pretty much heavy metal for non-metalheads. Metal adapted to pop.

But "Stay the Night" begs analysis. It came out while I was at BYU, and I and most of my friends listened to it, even danced to it, without really thinking too deeply about the lyrics. This was about a boy's passion for a girl, that was all.

I mean, I understood the irony in Heart's "Dreamboat Annie" when I was in High School. (Love that album. And wisdom and experience tell me so many more things when I listen to it now.) But it was several years later, when I met my cousin's sometimes boyfriend that she just couldn't leave behind, before I started really facing the irony that "Stay the Night" is so representative of.

Read the lyrics sometime. It's definitely youthful passion, definitely not the higher emotions of love. Watch the video with Debby Evans. It's amusing, very juvenile, very instructive of the value of juvenile passion.

I don't want you to misunderstand me

(But does he want to take the time to understand her?)

I just want to say what's on my mind
No need to hit me with an attitude
Because I haven't got the time

(No time? What's so much more important than understanding?)

And so forth. When passion remains untempered, when nothing gets in the way, something is lost.

I still enjoy the music, and the way it underscores the melodramatic lyrics. It seems I enjoy popular music now for the irony as much as I used to for the passion.