I can't express how happy I am that we have come to this point in Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, and here's why:
It's Ray Charles, man!
The female lines were sung by one of Ray's backup singers, who was told to hit the road a couple of years after this song went to No. 1. (Irony is king.)
It gives me the opportunity to introduce you to Mr. Charles doing this parody version for a KFC commercial.
Somebody, somewhere, needs to splice together every instance of Laura Petrie saying "Oh, Rob" into one big, beautiful supercut.
Only about a third of Gilligan’s Island episodes are about trying to get off the island.
Billy Joel wrote "We Didn't Start the Fire" as a response to a friend of Sean Lennon having said that Joel's life had been easy because he grew up in the 50s and everybody knows that nothing happened in the 50s.
The actor who was Alfalfa in the original Little Rascals/Spanky and Our Gang comedies, Carl Switzer, turned the key that opened the gym floor in It's a Wonderful Life and was the Haynes sisters' brother, "freckle-faced Haynes, the dog-faced boy," in White Christmas.
Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun
I know it shouldn't bother me, but it does: My high school and college-aged co-workers at FastStop do not know who John Wayne is.
The square root of 6,561 is 81.
During the year that Tom Hanks was losing weight to film the 2nd half of Cast Away, Robert Zemeckis and the whole crew filmed the jeepy-creepy What Lies Beneath.
The term "gaslighting" (a form of psychological manipulation where someone makes another person doubt their own reality, memories, or sanity) sprang from the 1944 film, Gaslight, though that film was based on a 1938 play of the same name.
"Pride (In the Name of Love)," was U2's first Top 40 hit. It only reached 33 on the Billboard charts, but went all the way to Number 378 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
It's a fine stadium rock anthem with the numerously-repeated subtitle easily sung along with.
According to songfacts.com, the song was inspired by a visit to the 1983 Martin Luther King, Jr. exhibit at the Chicago Peace Museum and calls to mind singular men who lived their lives in a way they could be proud of...lives dedicated to love for all of humanity:
The words, "Early morning, April 4, shot rings out in the Memphis sky. Free at last, they took your life. They could not take your pride" allude to Martin Luther King, Jr. (even though he was actually shot around 6 PM. No matter, Bono has since apologized for the historical inaccuracy.)
When he sings "One man come in the name of love" and "One man betrayed with a kiss," we are meant to think of Jesus and how Judas identified him to the arresting officers.
And then there's "One man caught on a barbed wire fence," which obviously is a tribute to Captain Virgil "The Cooler King" Hilts; the character in The Great Escape played by Steve McQueen.
To get caught up, you may want to go to the earlier post, "My Graphic Rabbit Hole," to get the origin story of these flights of fancy, wherein Microsoft's A.I. engine, CoPilot, reimagines a portrait of me as...
a friend of Calvin & Hobbes
a member of the Family Circus
an anime character
drawn by Charles Schulz
or, best for last (as always), part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe!
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