In the late 1970s The Trammps conceived a brilliant Disco Inferno, in which something would be burned down. Whether they meant the hot performance of a disco dance, or whether the torching of something big and malignant, it probably makes no difference. Something's gotta go, even if it's just lameness and dullness on the "disco round" (Alicia Bridges).

This cast contrasts the passing nature of social and political anger and social/political circumstances with the things that endure. I take the songs of The Carpenters as case in point! "Close to You" endures, while I can hardly remember the actual convulsions that were taking place on campus -- almost everywhere -- when we first heard it. "Close to You" doesn't bring to mind, at least for me, Watergate or "Tin soldiers and Nixon's coming"; but rather, cruising around Boston with my future wife (of now 46 years) or getting her to drive me to see Night of the Living Dead. I've basically forgotten what was happening in the big world then, tho' have not for a second forgotten what was happening inside me.

That is the lesson of this podcast, and we end with an excerpt from the near-sublime Carpenters track, "Love Is Surrender". LUV U.