{"id":4687,"date":"2009-06-01T12:02:38","date_gmt":"2009-06-01T17:02:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4687"},"modified":"2012-03-16T21:10:14","modified_gmt":"2012-03-17T02:10:14","slug":"things-im-supposed-to-hate-but-dont-katrina-and-the-waves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4687","title":{"rendered":"Things I’m Supposed To Hate, But Don’t: Katrina And The Waves"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ask a random sample of people who were thirteen or older during the eighties “what is the decade’s most tiresome icon”, and you’ll get a lot of answers, depending on where one was at the time; Boy George, “We Are The World”, “Choose Life” T-shirts, Don Johnson, the “Flock of Seagulls'” dude’s haircut, the training scene from Flashdance…<\/p>\n

…but as they go through their own personal lists, eventually most of them will get to “Walking On Sunshine<\/a>“, the too-big-to-measure one-hit-wonder by Katrina and the Waves.<\/p>\n

And it’s true; “Walking…” was very overplayed.<\/p>\n

But the reason tragedy wasn’t that the song overstayed its welcome; it’s that it became synonymous with the group that played it.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And that’s a shame – because Katrina and the Waves were a really, really good band.<\/p>\n

Even people who are sick to death of “Walking on Sunshine” admit that Katrina Leskanich, the band’s statuesque lead singer, had a voice and a half<\/a>.\u00a0 Of course, you have listen harder to hear that guitarist Kim Rew, in his first big gig after leaving the Soft Boys, had a way with bending and strangling chords into ad-hoc passages may not have been “Solos” in the Steve Vai sense of the term, but were really, really good.<\/p>\n

But here’s the real cool thing about The Waves; they did something that very, very few bands had done since John Fogerty left Creedence Clearwater Revival, and that had become an almost lost art in the meantime; they wrote small<\/a>, perfectly-crafted<\/a>, three -minute pop songs<\/a> that were shimmering little gems of pop perfection.\u00a0 Perhaps your world was falling apart at 10AM; perhaps it’d still be falling apart at 10:04; but from 10 to 10:03, you could smile and go “dang, that’s cool”…<\/p>\n

So yeah.\u00a0 Forget the “Sunshine”.\u00a0 Dig the wave.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ask a random sample of people who were thirteen or older during the eighties “what is the decade’s most tiresome icon”, and you’ll get a lot of answers, depending on where one was at the time; Boy George, “We Are The World”, “Choose Life” T-shirts, Don Johnson, the “Flock of Seagulls’” dude’s haircut, the training […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,14],"tags":[211],"class_list":["post-4687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mitch","category-music","tag-love-and-hate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4687"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4687\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26896,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4687\/revisions\/26896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}