Walk of Life

Listen while you read: (British version)

Here comes Johnny singing oldies, goldies
Be-Bop-a-Lula, Baby What'd I Say
Here comes Johnny singing I Got a Woman
Down in the tunnels, trying to make it pay

He got the action, he got the motion
Yeah, the boy can play
Dedication, devotion
Turning all the night time into the day

He do the song about the sweet loving woman
He do the song about the Knife
He do the walk, he do the walk of life
. . . 

~  Mark Knopfler (Dire Straits)

The video linked above is the "British version." When Dire Straits put out "Walk of Life" on Brothers in Arms in 1985, they followed up with two videos. The British version shows a guy in "the tunnels" (subway), playing music for tips, which is what the song is about. But Knopfler thought that Americans would much prefer a sports-themed video, so there is a second "official" video with sports as the visuals. For me, there was no question as to which one I wanted to attach to this post. Duh.

Yesterday, my guy and I were having a discussion about music (as we pretty much do, um, every time we're together), and somehow, we traveled back to the "hits" when we were children, back in the 50s and 60s, before the music revolution. I'd made a comment about how Louis Armstrong's "Hello, Dolly" hogged the charts in 1964 for like 40 weeks, and how pissed I was about that. And then we reached farther back to all those silly songs that captured our imagination back then, like "Monster Mash," "Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini," "Purple People Eater," and the like. And yeah, we sang all the verses our memories called up. (Sorry for the earworms.)

And then I mentioned a couple of songs from that childhood that were not silly, but actually, rather ageless. Peggy Lee's "Fever" and Bobby Darin's "Mack the Knife." On my drive home later, what do I hear on my radio? "Walk of Life," which makes a reference to "Mack the Knife." (Did you notice it?) Again, I love the serendipity of this blog! The Universe just keeps plopping songs in my lap!

So we're all walking the walk of life. There's been some rough terrain to navigate lately, but as long as we keep moving forward (and not backward as some would have us do), we'll be okay. As an obvious example of which direction we should be headed, putting our energy into fossil fuels would be like walking backward. Solar and wind moves us forward. I'm not sure why something so obvious fuels such argument. But again, no matter how divided we seem to be, there's always music to comfort us.

And after all the violence and the double talk
There's just a song in the trouble and the strife
You do the walk, you do the walk of life