All I Want. The Lightning Seeds. 1990. MCA

 Of the many, many songs I was introduced to at Sound Warehouse, where I worked for fourteen years, beginning in 1985, listening to the Lightning Seeds’ All I Want was the only time I felt compelled to fill one side of a Maxell XL-II C90 with only one song. I can remember it playing brilliantly, like a disco ball reflecting colored light, and thinking it was possible, through repeated plays, to capture that brilliance. The best pop music can make me feel as though I were on the verge of a synesthetic experience, with no clear path forward. Though I have yet to undergo any extreme sensory phenomenon and I’m always restored to banality as I knew it, the core certainty that I carry with me—that I am alive in a bottomless well of classic 45 rpm singles, a vast global resource powered by passion and commerce—is unendingly fostered by my obsessive/compulsive need for repetition, the paradoxical conviction that, in a world of infinite plenitude, your favorite song is the only thing worth hearing. Again.


Nov 6 021

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