2 October 1982
The most popular type of music in the world is soft rock. We can see that today with the stadium-filling success of Coldplay, Ed Sheeran and The Script, acts who draw heavy influence from U2. The word ‘bland’ immediately comes to mind, if only because they seem to try to appeal to as many people as possible by filing off any rough edges or sharp corners, leaving you unable to say anything more than that about it.
Chicago’s brand of piano-led ’80s US soft rock probably owes a lot to Wings, though I have no wish to tease this out any further. This music is astonishingly bland. Even so, a thought experiment where you put yourself in the mind of the average Chicago fan in 1982 would still register concepts like ‘enjoyment’, ’emotion’ and ‘excitement’; they obviously listened to it because they liked it. Call their favourite act ‘bland’ and they’d get just as het up and sinister as fans of BTS, or of One Direction before that. This isn’t something I can explain; I’ll just leave it here, safe in the knowledge that any extant fans of Chicago are probably too old or IT-illiterate to join battle online.
