6) Kansas - Monolith

I'm out of order? You're out of order. The whole trial is out of order! From day 1 everybody said totally fine if British people want to play this pretentiously juvenile and bombastic form of rock music over on their island, but this is America, damnit. Progressive, schmogressive, you'll write pop chord changes, and you'll like it! Gold and Platinum selling albums labeled as "commercial failures," the band feeling like the thousands of people there to see them in concert didn't like these songs. Kansas IS prog-rock, not imitating prog-rock, or flirting with prog, they ARE prog. Reading anything about Kansas is like following a cookbook recipe but substituting every ingredient without measuring and then complaining to the writer that it tastes terrible. 

Why is it Sandra's 4th pick? Well, clearly we're dealing with different interpretations of the same phenomena, trying to understand some perspective different from your own. Oh wait, did i unbag the cat too early? Was i supposed to lead up to that? Oh well, what's their 6th album Monolith sound like? I have a sneaking suspicion it will sound a lot like Kansas... 

... man, there's just something so familiar about that Native American in a fuzzy coat wearing a space helmet with bison horns on it, surrounded by crumbling infrastructure, like i saw something similar recently. Something about the government and a bunch of heavily armed space cadets or something. Oh well, not important, press play. 

Did you know Kerry Livgren was sort of in a cult for a while? He was big into this thing called The Urantia Book, assembled by a doctor who studied a neighbor with strange sleeping trances where he babbled about alien gods delivering religious sermons. He actually hired a stenographer to write it all down so his book club friends could have something interesting to talk about. That's a hardcore paraphrase, by the way, it's actually pretty interesting. 

Oh yeah, the music, i almost forgot. You are not going to believe how much these guys sound like Kansas. It's uncanny. You know who loves Kansas? Bottle. Oh wait, I'm Bottle. This IS Kansas? Oh ok, no wonder i was confused for a moment, i thought this was something totally different than what it's been the whole time. 

Now that that sarcasm is out of my system, let's thumbtack some important nodes in this network of associations. Where's my spool of thread? There it is, wrong pocket, forget my own head next. 

So, everyone has a bias, some prejudices, assumptions about how everything works. That's great when the reality you experience matches up with it, but what's a girl or dude supposed to do when it all goes haywire? Nothing's working right, everyone's acting crazy and confused, my instruction manual is in Portugese all of a sudden. 

Well, some people blame everyone else, some people go search for a revised edition, some people learn to read Portugese, some people just take a break, hide in their own bunker, and wait for the storm to pass. You gotta be willing to pick whichever one of those options is most helpful at the moment, not whichever one feels easiest. Sometimes you have to look on the bright side, but sometimes you have to choose to suffer a little, or play a different game. If you're playing backgammon in the service box, you're gonna take quite a few tennis balls to the noggin and walk away a couple dice short of a yahtzee. But, who was wrong in that silly analogy? The whole situation was stupid, so maybe that's an important consideration.... 

Long story longer, i freakin' love Kansas, and no doubt about it, this is certainly a Kansas album about remembering the past, longing to return from the edge of catastrophe, getting back to helping each other, and looking at things from a different perspective. What's not to love about it? Standout tracks and obvious anachronistic commercial singles are terribly disruptive, that's REO Speedwagon's tragic approach. I think you've all got this confused with Three Dog Night, they went from awesome to trendy crap for lack of inspiration. This is just as good as any other Kansas album and you're the one who's being inconsistent as you get older and more crochety. 

Like i said, you're out of order! Kansas isn't saying "burn it to the ground!," they're saying deep in our souls we all know it will eventually crumble, and this won't be the happy part of future mythologies.

Part 7