Posted On: Tuesday - September 10th 2019 6:24PM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity Music Humor Geography
Overheard last week in a Prague coffee shop: "Thank you for the .mp3, man; I had no idea that these guys were in a band before Wings!"
You gotta give the former East Bloc countries a break - they may really have not learned who Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, much less John, Paul, George and Ringo, were, until the wall came down. But there's no excuse for people in Paris or Rome. I've noticed that they range from 2 to 3 decades behind in their knowledge of good rock music.
Yes, the line at the top was made up here, but it's the T-shirts and what the street musicians play that make me think this. I guess they can't be blamed, as Peak Stupidity's opinion is that 99 % of good rock and pop was created in the English-speaking world. Yes, yes, there's Nena and that great song about those 99 red balloons, but can that match up to some AC/DC?
You really just want to grab 'em, spend a few hours on Rosetta Stone, well, not in that order, and go "Man, c'mon it's a good song, but Hotel California was released 40 years ago. Let it go, man!"
I've seen this in my travels to Europe almost 3 decades back, and we saw it again on our recent vacation trip. I'm miffed, but then again, it's not a bad thing really. We've featured a few (try here and here) recent pieces of modern music, but most of it does suck. Europe's still got its castles and beautiful churches - they may as well still listen to Baker Street and Sympathy for the Devil.
Next trip, I will break out my old KIZZ Destroyer T-shirt so that I can blend in and not look like the usual ugly American. The Chinamen have got that covered.
It's pretty hard to play this one as a European street musician, but it's a Peak Stupidity favorite from a band, The Electric Light Orchestra, or ELO that we've featured only once before.
Don't Jeff Lynne's electric guitar solos sound a lot like those of Brian May of Queen? (Check out the short awesome solo from 1:12 to 1:30.)
The British band ELO's virtuoso, Jeff Lynne, wrote the whole album Out of the Blue that Mr. Blue Sky is on, in 3 1/2 weeks time in his chalet "on the continent", as they say. This was in October of 1977, so yeah, we are all Europeans tonight.
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