Karma Chameleon

Chuck Klosterman brings up an important point in his article “That 70s Cruise”, why do new Journey songs suck?

How can the band that wrote Don’t Stop Believin’ not be able to replicate that. This would be easy to dismiss if there was not a move to take the art out of commerce. Cultural critic Theodor Adorno described the cultural landscape as an industry, why aren’t bands like Journey able to replicate their hits? Or Boy George for that matter? We are lead to believe that pop music is not the work of muses, that it’s a craft. The Brill Building, Motown, Sun Records, all pumped out hits. After you write a great pop song, don’t you learn how to write a great pop song?

The first verse of Karma Chameleon is pretty great. And how the line splits before the chorus comes in is something you don’t catch unless you pay attention.

Desert loving in your eyes all the way
If I listen to your lies would you say
I’m a man without conviction
I’m a man who doesn’t know
How to sell a contradiction
You come and go
You come and go

It’s almost too tight to pull apart. It’s not an admittance that the narrator is a man without conviction, that he’s a man who doesn’t know how to sell a contradiction as the repeated last line would suggest. It’s stating something that would only be true if he “listened to your lies” And still, this is only something, you, the person he is singing to might say.

Or does he know? Or is that the contradiction. If you believe in the last line, which is pretty contradictory of a statement, it contradicts the previous verse. And by contradicting that, it makes everything up until the last line true.

Which is pretty amazing when you think about it. Or think too much about it.