Altstadt (the old town) in Bamberg, via Wikipedia.
Previously: 40 Years in Beer, Part Thirty-Two: Vienna’s “Old Whisky Malt Waltz,” a precursor of beer revolutions to come.
Keyboardist Robert Lamm of the venerable pop-rock band Chicago generally is regarded as one of his generation’s finer pop-rock songwriters, which utterly fails to explain his choice of words in the chorus of “Forever” (1986).
Forever
is a long, long time.
Longer than we ever realize.
Forever
is a long, long time.
I’m gonna love you the rest of my life.
Forever.
Trite much?
Earth to Robert: Of course forever is a long time—got anything else?
On the bright side, this song’s horn arrangement, which is positioned as an instrumental bridge, actually is an improvement on Chicago’s usual 1980s synth-driven standards (please don’t ask me how I know all this), and if I’m to be charitable, perhaps Lamm’s words aren’t quite as clunky as they appear at first.
That’s because “forever” must be contextualized. After all, there is Homo sapiens time, and there is deep time.
Most of us understand that deep time is well-nigh incomprehensible. Homo sapiens time is an expedient and purely relative construction, devised to assist us in better organizing our consciousness during the sadly finite period we’re allotted to walk the earth.
Consequently, if...
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