Sunday, March 29, 2009

REO Speedwagon "Keep on Loving You"

In 1988, while riding in my 1973 Plymouth Duster listening to an REO Speedwagon tape on my boom box, my friend Pat tried to tell me that REO wasn’t cool. Pat had clearly never seen this video.

Whether a talented singer/songwriter or an actor playing a patient visiting a psychiatrist, Kevin Cronin was cool personified. He was cool enough to figure out that if you hold the “rrrr” you can make any two words that end in “r” rhyme, including “remember” and “together”. He starts the video by confessing that he made up the woman he’s singing about, but the meat of the song, which is barely one minute long, makes even less sense in that context. It's like he wrote a catchy chorus and then cut and pasted in some limericks from an unrelated, unfinished song.

Keeping on loving an imaginary girl that “played dead” but “never bled” doesn’t necessarily make sense, but neither does my love of 80s music…loving it is the only thing I wanna do-oo-oo…

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