Chant this quickly over and over in your best medium sing-song voice:
Now I hear them moving
muffled noises coming through the doorI feel I'm cracking up
voices growing louder
irritation building andI'm close to fainting – cracking up
they must know by now
I'm in here tremblingin a terror ever growing – cracking up
my whole world is falling
going crazythere is no escaping now I'm cracking up
I'm an ABBA fan. but you already knew that.
I noticed in iTunes that I have 62 songs where I've actually embedded the word "paranoid" in the comment. This particular selection, The Visitors is from 1981 and headlined the album of the same name, kind of the same way it headlines my paranoid playlist.
Funny, when I glance through the entire playlist, I see lots of songs from 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986 and 1987. It seems on first inspection that most of them are from the early 1980s.
That's not quite true, though. A handful are sprinkled in from 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004.
Songs from artists like (all links go to the iTunes Music Store) ABBA, The Human League, The Police, The Plimsouls, Dolly Parton, Pat Travers, Santana, Matchbox Twenty, New Order, Naomi, Saga, Momus, Gary Numan, Don Henley and Styx.
So here's the big question… what was going on in the world that would make me see things thru paranoid colored goggles for 8 years in the 80s and for 5 years so far in the 00s? What was there that was here, went away for 8 years and then came back? Hmmmm. I wonder.
Funny how you can start drawing conclusions from random statistics isn't it? I knew a guy in San Francisco that insisted it was good for Heavy Metal music whenever the republicans got elected to office. I don't know if it's true, but it does seem to bear some looking into. After all, my "look over your shoulder" meter sure seems to get activated a lot more under similar conditions.
Oh and if you really want to see the biggest coincidence in the paranoid playlist, you don't have to go any further than The Human League's Dreams of Leaving. You see, the first time it came out was in about the time Ronald Regan was first elected. Guess what just got remixed and re-released… 25 years later, and it's still just as paranoid, and just as telling.
