Sunday, April 22, 2012

It's gonna be a long night, it's gonna be alright. . .



I heard “Nightshift” at the Price Chopper this afternoon.

I don't think that I can name any other post-Lionel Ritchie Commodores songs. I like how this song sutures a tribute to these two recently passed (at the time) singers, Marvin Gaye and Jackie Wilson to working class listening practice. The feeling that it tries to evoke—the importance of the radio's company to getting through a long lonely nightshift—is powerful.

The song reinforces the notion that these two artists will live on in those crucial late night listens, which I sweet, but I think there is also a mournfulness in it, a compressed and softened form of blues-moan that assuages grief through its expression, that, in its mechanistic undertones, echoes with worker alienation—ghost voices put to work long after the bodies that produced them are dust.