Steve Winwood - "Higher Love" (1986)

Jon just gave me an LP, Steve Winwood's Back in the High Life. It's great. This music triggers a lot of memories for me, mostly the neighbor's pool on summer nights, staying in hotels on vacation, and watching music videos on cable in someone's basement. This is the kind of music that instantly strikes you as sounding "eighties." It was made in 1986, which i believe was the most "eighties" year of the eighties. In support of this thesis, i have compiled a truncated list of movies and records that came out in 1986:

Movies - Blue Velvet, Crocodile Dundee, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Short Circuit, Top Gun

Music - Big Black's Atomizer, a terrible Cheap Trick album The Doctor, Bad Brains's I Against I, Master of Puppets, Reign in Blood, Slippery When Wet, Peter Gabriel's So, Graceland, PIL's Album

The most striking thing about this album is how great it sounds. Take the first song, which you will surely recognize, "Higher Love." This makes me wistful for the days of analogue recording. It starts off with a pretty spare drum intro (and in full 80s style features live and programmed drums as well as extra percussion) that establishes the wonderfully spacious sound of the recording. It's really like entering an aurally defined open, reverberant room... it's hard to explain why this is so cool, but much like My Bloody Valentine, there is a physical aspect to the sound that draws you into it in a way that's altogether different from the appeal of rhythms and words.

Once the song gets going there are plenty of layers of instrumentation, and I should add that the bass sounds particularly amazing. Great bass is definitely one of the areas in which vinyl cannot be beaten. The lyrics are pretty astounding, embracing fully first world privilege in a way that now seems so emblematic of the 80s. On the one hand, there are the obligatory reference to the state of things: "Things look so bad everywhere/In this whole world, what is fair?" Just about the level of awareness of the global situation evinced in "Do They Know It's Christmas?"

But what's the real vibe of this song? There's a totally triumphant feeling here, that we've achieved such a marvel of material comforts that all that remains is direct and unmediated communion with God Itself. You know, a Higher Love. Morning in America. Maybe the dude from the video will take that super hot girl to some unspecified exotic local and help out some locals, gaining a deep spiritual understanding in the process, and perhaps birthing world music as well. If Peter Gabriel hadn't done it, it just might have been Steve Winwood.