How easily you can take your eye off the ball and fool yourself. When I glanced at the press release for ‘Cyclism’ I immediately concluded it was going to be an avant garde examination of cyclistic tendencies in sociological interpretations of critical race theory or something equally highfalutin.
I need to get out more often.
It’s a song about cycling.
Well, to be precise, “cycling and a life in motion.”
We have been here before. In the 1990s Kraftwerk recorded the classic ‘Tour de France’ and other attempts to get us out of the Lexus (ha!) and onto two wheels have included Queen’s ‘Bicycle Race’, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ ‘Bicycle Song’, Tom Waits’ ‘Broken Bicycles’, while Sia was ‘Riding on my bike’ and Katie Melua had nine million of them. Shonen Knife meanwhile informed us that ‘Cycling is fun’ and should have been signed up for a TV advert by the Department of Health.
Stenlund’s song takes a more formal line than those popular ditties, as if emphasing the need for young boys and girls to take the Cycling Proficiency Test, something that is as outdated here in the UK today as floppy discs, Myspace and VHS recorders while the kids do their wheelies on and off pavements with gay abandon, knocking down old ladies for fun.
By which I mean it is a little similar to the Autobahn boys, clean and angular, and with an oriental hint to it as well. It’s the sort of tune that might have found a place in the film Lost in Translation.
Stenlund emerges out of a wide variety of influences covering the synth and post punk early 1980s and with special respect to the likes of Depeche Mode, Human League and The Cure, and even more so to Bowie.
He seems to be developing a personal style that is an amalgam of all the above but majority owned by Stenlund.
I’ll be interested to see where this goes. The graphic for the song is suggestive of a dystopian undercurrent in his work which is yet to emerge, a city apparently shattered by a cataclysm if you’ll pardon the word play, but where he nonchalantly rides his bike anyway.
We have no social links yet for Stenlund, they will be added when they are available.
