Ball of Confusion. The Temptations. 1970. Gordy.

The secret language of 45s is spoken only in the vivid silence of a record’s afterplay, and may sometimes—depending upon the listener—be accessible only after repeated plays. It works like this. The first line of the record will penetrate those shadows of consciousness where concepts lie around, waiting to be called into action. For example, Ball of Confusion’s first line comes across the terms “racial bias” on the floor of my brain and carefully considers the words’ experience of reality versus what the first line itself knows of the world around you. Does the first line recognize itself in you; is your mind judged competent enough to bear the weight of what follows? It’s this initiation into the process that gives the beginnings of great songs all their excitement; how long until—when and if—the song discontinues its engagement with you. What then follows is a dialogue of dissociative imagery and concepts, axioms and non-sequiturs that challenges clarity and establishes the pop record as a non doctrinal cure for the aggravation of the real. The theorem “Evolution Revolution Gun Control Sound of Soul,” explicates this startling truth about our curiously bicameral, aesthetic relationship to the commercial recordings of the rock and roll era: moral ambiguity once traveled at the speed of 45 rpm. Moral certainty, with its irritatingly prominent sun-damaged warp always maddeningly in the same spot, at 33.3. Thus, rock and roll’s dexterous tendency to steamroll past the facile tonics of context and comprehension, well past the need to even express itself in a language easy to understand. “GREAT OOGA BOOGA CAN’T YOU HEAR ME TALKING TO YOU!”

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