What I’m listening to right now.
Alan Parsons Project, “Eye In The Sky.”
I remember buying this album on vinyl in 1982 when it was released, at a record store in Eureka during a weekend visiting my dad’s house there. It was not the first record I bought, but for some reason I remember the day I bought with weird clarity. Why does music work that way, sometimes?
If you want something profound about the symbolism of the song, I will leave you with this obscure philosophical reference: it’s about Orwell and the surveillance state (which I think was what inspired me to go ahead and buy the album despite the “soft rock” top-40 stigma surrounding it, which didn’t necessarily impress me at age 17). It seems weirdly prescient from where we sit now. It makes me think of how Foucault deploys Bentham’s panopticon concept as a metaphor.
The video, nevertheless, I concede is cheesy. You have to concede that the concept of the “music video” was only a few years old at this point.
