The Grenadines paid us a visit last summer with a macho number, ‘Smile’ about men being men and the need to take responsibility for intimacy and passion in their relationships. An Alpha Male thing that oozed sexuality like it was about to go out of fashion.
So you can’t blame me for thinking, when I saw the title of this new single, ‘Hooked on you’, that they might be about to cross a frontier into unknown territory, perhaps pushing that envelope even further.
Forget it. The ‘you’ here isn’t a person; it is music itself, a femme fatale as song, despite intense lyrics that do indicate a sense of obsession with a human.
They aren’t the first to write a song praising music. In fact there is a legion of them that did it indirectly including Billy Joel (‘Piano Man’); Marvin Gaye (‘What’s going on’); Daft Punk (‘Around the world’); Sia (‘Alive’); Earth Wind and Fire (‘Gratitude’); and The Who (the ‘Quadrophenia’ album).
And that’s not to mention two artists/bands that I can think of that went the whole hog and named their songs of praise ‘Music’’ namely John Miles and Nightwish; both of them at the very top of their game.
Those last two are very high bars for anyone to challenge and The Grenadines do it in a different manner altogether, forgoing huge anthems in favour of a 1960/70s-sounding soul track that might have drifted out of Detroit and languished in a bottle that washed up somewhere in the Øresund Sound.
To The Grenadines music is a seductive and demanding force — a siren that lures you into a love affair you can’t escape from.
I doubt that many people reading this piece would disagree with that assessment. Music has the power to affect you in a way that poetry, prose, novels, TV dramas and especially Hollywood movies can’t quite reach.
So salute The Grenadines for reminding us of that fact. And helping to keep me in a job.
Find them on:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thegrenadinesband
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thegrenadines/
