The band had a history, and the players went on to other projects, but reality has nothing to do with this, so I'm not going into a breathy disquisition on Davey Paton and his impressive credits. It probably didn't necessarily have to be this particular band and this particular lineup -- the song was no masterpiece, in reality.
It's approximately the dumbest good song ever recorded, in any realistic appraisal.
The lyrics are, in the larger scheme of things, absolutely puerile. They are about nothing -- they are about a guy who doesn't feel especially guilty because he's not really accomplishing anything. They are about sleeping late, and having no goals. Kind of like the three-minute pop version of Seinfeld.
And yet, without the dumb, empty lyrics, the music (which is likely, I admit, the thing that's metastasized through my brain like a crush on a pop star) would have less impact.
I am going to wander off the point long enough to point out a few things, such as that when I say "power pop" I describe a very specific genre of music that's been around since rock and roll has been around, but really kicked up its heels in the seventies. It was, largely, Beatles-influenced, though I think crazy old Phil Spector's Wall-o-sound gets a little cred, too, and general doo-wop and Motown ballad esthetic. If not for it all, power pop wouldn't have packed the same wallop.
By power pop I do not mean certain things. I do not mean bubblegum pop, necessarily, though some power pop bands -- most notably, the Sweet -- did occasionally verge over from power pop into bubblegum or, even more rarely, vice-versa (I don't have any examples, but I'm sure it happened).
I do not mean any band that did not have someone on board who could not play a creditable guitar fill or lead solo.
I do not mean any band playing anything other than rock and R&B-influenced mainstream pop -- this excludes disco songs and anything that could even vaguely qualify as a country song, either real country or the dreck that passes for "country" music here in the 21st century.
I do not mean Britney Spears, or Donnie and Marie Osmond, or anybody else who is a singer with a manufactured backing band composed of studio whores who don't write the songs sung by said singer(s). Power pop almost always is played by ensembles of musicians who actually work and write songs together, for whatever reason. No real explanations for that, here -- just seems like it's usually the case.
I also want to make it clear that this song has absolutely no meaning in my life, in any context, other than as the subject of an occasional obsession. My fascination with it has no connection to any real occurrence in my life. Some people get hung up on particular songs because they associate them with positive or negative things that occurred while they were listening -- I was snowed in during a blizzard with only the CDs of the first Ben Folds Five album and Soul Coughing's 'Ruby Vroom,' for instance, and both will always hold context for me. I spent two solid hours once listening to Soundgarden's song Black Hole Sun during the worst of my divorce. This is context. My fascination with Magic is devoid of this. Entirely.
I always loved power pop. I grew up on it. I always used to listen to AM radio pop when I was a kid, because it was the kind of music a kid could really grok and get into. Musically, it's not rocket science -- major open and diminished chords, the occasional minor chord or modulation to another key that builds some kind of weird new neural pathway you don't even know about at the time it's happening.
It's physics on some level, and apparently songwriters of the early seventies figured out the formula, because there's a very great honkin' lot of the stuff floating around out there. You can preview the songs on some seventies radio anthology and immediately find your brain full of songs you hadn't thought about in twenty years. Well, if you're old enough to remember the seventies, and didn't give yourself a stroke during the disco era and forget everything that had happened to you before that moment, at least.
I remember the song from when I was a kid (I'm not old enough to have heard Magic as something that was aimed at me; I was ten years old when the song was released and got played on the radio). The song didn't get any hooks in me when I was a kid, though.
I was on my way out of a moderately long marriage about a decade ago, now, and carrying on an affair of electronic letters with someone who ultimately behaved execrably (but that was months later) to me. One subject to which we invariably went was popular music. We'd been discussing power pop -- what distinguishes it, what songs were really underrated, who'd gotten the short end of which stick ... how unfair it was that DJs called Cheap Trick the Sears Beatles, for instance ... and I'd put on a radio show on an out-of-town FM station that was playing seventies stuff, including (unavoidably) a hefty serving of power pop from the era.
I was cleaning the bathroom in my small apartment, and had been required to wedge my head awkwardly around the toilet tank to retrieve a band-aid wrapper that had blown back into an inconvenient corner ... when the song came on the radio. I'd made fun of the song over the years, quoting the "wo-ho-ho, it's magic!" as a punch line to cynical jokes. I had written it off as pre-disco bubblegum shit, without having heard it since about 1976, other than in passing.
When the guitar solo hit, I jerked back up from behind the toilet so fast, I actually hit my head.
It is my firm conviction that there are strange coincidences of resonance between certain songs and certain human brains. If you throw enough stuff at a song, enough diminished chords and a certain tempo, you're likely to fascinate the brains of a significant portion of the population. I think songs like Magic are coincidences of just the right noise and rhythm and pluck just the right visceral strings in some of us that we will never quite get over them. Witness the collective insanity among vast swaths of the population over Hey Ya a few years back.
It ain't the only song that's done that to me, but it happened to come up in the rotation on ITunes, and I decided to come over here and blather about it because I set up a damn web journal because the real people in my life are freakin' sick of hearing about a thirty-one-year old song that most of them didn't really give a shit about when they heard it anyway. Maybe my small pathologies will entertain some random stranger for a few minutes. If so, hi -- I'm actually a fairly normal person with a few peculiarities. Just like everybody else.
It's not the only song that occasionaly snags me, and your mileage may vary. You may not like that song; there may be another song you obsess over. There may be people out there walking the street who will, one day, concuss themselves on a household object because after twenty-odd years, they finally actually heard a song like Modest Mouse's Float On, after having it become wallpaper when they were kids.
But I'm tellin' you this right now, Starland Vocal Band, you are on warning -- if I ever lose my ability to reason and think clearly, and go off on some kind of crazy rampage, Pilot won't have to take the blame. Eric Carmen and the Raspberries will get off absolutely scot-free.
It'll be Afternoon Delight that's the soundtrack to my undoing. Guaranteed.
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