I played 6:30 AM basketball this morning-- and I played poorly to boot, missing three lay-ups and most of my outside shots-- so I figured I'd just do a tongue-in-cheek sentence and go take a nap . . . I was going to claim, with my impeccable dry wit, that Sugar's song "Hoover Dam" is probably in the top five songs about dams (and probably the best song about the Hoover Dam) but then I got to poking around on the internet and the internet's giant digital mega brain reminded me that the song "The Highwayman" has a verse about a workman who slips and falls into the wet concrete of the Hoover Dan and is buried "in that gray tomb that knows no sound," which is as dramatic and evocative a blue-collar death as they come and so now I've got to decide if Sugar's "Hoover Dam" is a better song than "Highwayman," which is a tough one-- I certainly like Sugar's song better-- and I've been listening to "Copper Blue" quite a bit recently-- and "Highwayman" merely uses working on the Hoover Dam as one stop in a journey of reincarnation, from brigand to sailor to worker to starship captain to drop of rain-- the dam is not the main image of the song-- while Sugar's "Hoover Dam" is a vertiginous cinematic yawp about existence, purpose, and perspective that begins:
Standing on the edge of the Hoover Dam
I'm on the center line, right between two states of mind
And if the wind from the traffic should blow me away
From this altitude, it will come back to you
and then, after much existential meandering, the song ends "standing on the edge of the Hoover Dam"-- and this is repeated over and over, it's quite catchy-- and now that I've really thought about it and done some research, I am going to sincerely claim that Sugar's "Hoover Dam" is the best song about the Hoover Dam.
4 comments:
it's a certified banger, and that's one of my favorite records. i saw bob mould and his band play the entirety of copper blue on the 25th anniversary of its release. have almost regained my hearing.
Don’t omit Rhett and Link’s song about the Hoover Dam! It’s called “Hoover Dam.” And it’s got some fast facts about the dam within the lyrics. It’s not a “better” song than Sugar’s or the Highwaymen’s, since you like qualitative commentary about art, but it has a catchy little hook. And facts!
i feel like we don't talk about rhett and link enough. i enjoy those guys.
rhett and link? i am not familiar . . . but i listened to a moment of their song and I pronounce it not as good as either the sugar song or the highwayman. those songs are, as whitney likes to say "better." or as I like to say: better!
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