Coprock

Posted March 27th, 2003 by Sean Williams

Pop songs have a half life. A song shoots up the charts, or whatever has replaced the charts now, and the radio audience can’t believe how catchy and fun a song is, and they want to hear it, apparently, seventeen hundred times a day. Then they start to notice that they aren’t paying attention because they know every single nuance, every single backing vocal, every possible musical minutiae. As a child, when they still played 45s, some of the top 40 stations would play songs at 47 or 48 so they could play “the most songs in a day”. And the variation in pitch was something my idiot second grade friends could pick up on because they heard the song a billion times a day.

So the audience gets bored without realizing it and the song starts slipping down the charts, or whatever it is now. Then a month or six weeks pass and someone gets a wild hair up their ass and plays that old song on the radio. Old, in that it slipped six weeks ago. And the audience thinks its awesome because they have instant nostalgia for, y’know, late January now that it’s March, or something.

Anyway, I think this is true. I noticed it when I was a kid and I was so glad that “Bette Davis Eyes” wasn’t on the radio anymore because it would scare the crap out of me, and suddenly, there it was again, playing once an hour for a couple of days. Ever since then I have assumed this half-life theory, but once I got introduced to actual math I realized that since I can’t really prove this is true, since it is something I decided was true and then looked for proof, I can’t really say it’s true.

Anyway, that is how I feel about the cops and the military today. Everywhere I went it seemed like there was someone with a gun. Last night when I drove to Brooklyn to pick up my mom from my brother’s house there were cops everywhere. Tonight when I went to Guitar Center, there were cops everywhere. Every train has a cop on it, a block from my house there are marines in the middle of the road protecting the Triboro.

We may be a target, but it looks to me like we put a bullet-proof vest on top of that target. I might just have decided that’s true and I am looking for proof, but I can’t imagine why thinking any other way would be better.