IMAGINE THAT


on the other side of the summer.

As I listened to Blake Lewis neatly, sweetly croon his way through Imagine last night, a considerably rougher, tougher, angrier voice from almost twenty years ago came roaring into my ears. Blake may have been singing Lennon, but all I could hear was Elvis:

Wasn’t it a millionaire who said “imagine no possessions”?

By the time we'd slogged through all those cloying, gratuitous, somewhere-in-Africa-and-America clips and gotten to the smiley, giggly, a-little-shrieky-in-the-end Jordin Sparks, African-American daughter of a former NFL player, summoning all seventeen years' worth of wealth and privilege to tell all those starving children that they'll never walk alone, Elvis had dropped back a verse and was really lettin' it rip:

The automatic gates close up between the shanties and the palace
The blowtorch amusements, the voodoo chalice
The pale pathetic promises that everybody swallows
A teenage girl is crying cause she don't look like a million dollars
So help her if you can
Cause she don't seem to have the attention span.

But then, last night at least, neither did I.

Posted: Wed - April 25, 2007 at 04:06 PM          

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