"Play Something Upbeat"

Often, I feel as if I am an alien from another planet. Do I hear music differently than other people? Have I so completely deluded myself into blurring the lines between trashy pop hits and respectable music that people are laughing at me? Or maybe there's some food in my teeth... I don't know. And it's when things like this happen that I begin to question myself.

Saturday night, I'm at the Tiger's Tale in Montgomery, NJ (which DOES exist, Don). It's just outside of Princeton, so I know it's a fairly "normal", educated, competent section of New Jersey. I'm setting up for karaoke night, and I'm playing a few tunes from my iPod to get things warmed up. The manager comes up to me and says, "Could you turn up the volume? And maybe play something a little more upbeat, we have a pretty young crowd in here tonight".

By "young crowd", she meant "people born in the late '60s, early '70s".

And the song I was playing when she asked me to play something "a little more upbeat" was "Got to Get You Into My Life" by Earth, Wind & Fire. It's a cover of a fairly upbeat, soulful Beatles song by one of the great upbeat funk bands of all time.




If you fancy yourself a DJ, try that one on for size. Go on, try and think of something MORE upbeat. There' s plenty of things equally upbeat to this song, but try "taking it up a notch".

Yeah, that's what I thought.

Looks like I gotta go find some more "upbeat" records.