Dude, I Just Had My Mind Blown
Alan Parsons Project “Eye In The Sky” “Don’t Answer Me”
So a friend and I were only just talking about the mutability of childhood memory, especially where pop culture’s concerned. And then this.
When I was a kid, my favorite video on MTV, “Take On Me” held aside, was by the Alan Parsons Project. I could recount the plot for you–basically a PG-rated synopsis of Sin City a decade before the fact–and i could remember loving the song. But I would’ve sworn that the song in question was “Eye In The Sky,” the only Alan Parsons song I’d heard as an adult that I liked. Most of the balance sounded to me like ELO except not-good.
When I fact-checked via YouTube I was mindblown.
Once I got past the initial shock at the error in my memory, it was almost four straight minutes of smiles. “Don’t Answer Me” is a fucking masterpiece, even though it’s kinda weird that the story in the video has so little to do with the song’s lyrics. And it takes a whole lot to keep my smiling through an ’80s sax solo.
Which is not to give short shrift to “Eye In The Sky,” a moodier ballad than the Spector-inspired “Don’t Answer Me,” and with at least slightly different concerns. But it’s not a stretch to imagine the heartbroken speaker of the latter song might transition out of railing against an emotionally unavailable lover and end up the paranoid stalker with a God complex in the former.
Ah, more twisted psychosexual energy. God bless Alan Parsons, and his project.
