Interlude: Five-Oh-Oh.

I’m sure we all need a break from this Comet Gain stuff by now. I’ve been spending a few days listening to – wow, get this - other music before I launch into the next bit.

And conveniently enough, we have an anniversary to mark in the meantime. Blogger Dashboard tells me that this thing what you are currently reading is the 500th post on Stereo Sanctity.

I guess 500 posts in seven and a bit years is nothing to shout about in blog terms, but if my calculations are correct (they’re probably not) I reckon it averages out at about one post per six days since May 2004 – a far better breakdown than I was expecting, given my frequent failure to get a post done at least once a week and irregular lapses into unexpected hiatus over the years.

By way of celebration, I’ve tidied up the dead wood in the links list a bit – never let it be said I don’t know how to party. So what does the future hold for what history will record as the distinctly-turn-of-the-century medium of the Music Blog? Fuck all, if the number of decent ones still standing is any indication, but a desert can be a cool place to be, so I’ll keeping plugging away.

For no reason whatsoever, I will dedicate the rest of this post to revisiting a video I’ve already posted once before, from Kuwait’s The Bendaly Family, just because it never fails to fill my heart with joy.

So much to love going on here, but I would in particular draw your attention to;

1. The way this video seems to suggest a fully formed Wes Anderson-style movie, all about the way that starry-eyed Mr Bendaly has coerced his wife and daughters (and nieces? sisters? who knows..) into becoming his backing band as he pursues his goal of international pop stardom. Participation, you feel, is compulsory in this family – anyone who lacks rudimentary musical talent, well they’ll just have to clap their hands, or do some dancing!

2. Also playing into this imagined motion picture is the way in which The Bendaly Family manage to totally rock the idea of vintage/indie dress codes and contemporary wimp/girl/amateur-friendly pop performance aesthetics… in Kuwait in 1978.

3. Above all though, I just really love the way that this song is actually three completely separate songs with wholly conflicting moods, crudely crowbarred together with no attempt at all to disguise the joins – first the forlorn, political angst-ridden “those guys who cause all the trouble” section, then the sexy “do you love me?” belly-dancing bit, then the big, wholesome “la la la” pop chorus. Mr Bendaly’s jaunty ‘I’m goin’ for a walk’ arm swinging move as he introduces the latter section, singing “when I go… etc”, is just the greatest thing.

Actually, checking back, those are pretty much exactly the same observations that I made when I first posted the video in August ’09… but hopefully they bear repeating.

I guess it is the fact that just about every country on earth has a wealth of stuff this awesome buried in its culture – so much so that after decades of obsessive immersion I’m nowhere near even hitting bottom on my own particular corners of closer-to-home Anglo-American pop music – that keeps me doing this crap five hundred ‘publish now’ clicks later.

Labels: anniversaries, The Bendaly Family