One of my favorite Wikipedia entries comes from this song. This entire passage just cracks me up.
“Spirit in the Sky” makes several religious references to Jesus, and Greenbaum himself is Jewish. In a 2006 interview with The New York Times, Greenbaum told a reporter he was inspired to write the song after watching Porter Wagoner singing a gospel song on TV. Greenbaum said: “I thought, ‘Yeah, I could do that,’ knowing nothing about gospel music, so I sat down and wrote my own gospel song. It came easy. I wrote the words in 15 minutes.” Greenbaum had previously been a member of psychedelic jug band Dr. West’s Medicine Show and Junk Band.
Next time you listen to it, imagine the situation that is being presented. The singer said that all the words are literally what the guy at the department store was saying without knowing who Mark Knopfler (the singer) was. Add in the video (in a time when computer graphics were very primitive) and it’s really one of those great stories.
Not sure this is the cause in these cases, but it’s all too common in design by committee. Keeping the creative direction and vision in a single person is so damn important.
This is exactly how I feel about Money for nothing by Dire Straits…
One of the best intro riffs of all time, then it sounds like something from a BBC kids show.
Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky”. Those crispy awesome guitar riffs, and then you start singing some trite crap about Jeebus? It’s maddening!
One of my favorite Wikipedia entries comes from this song. This entire passage just cracks me up.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_in_the_Sky
It doesn’t make me any less upset to listen to the song itself, but that is fantastic, lol.
Next time you listen to it, imagine the situation that is being presented. The singer said that all the words are literally what the guy at the department store was saying without knowing who Mark Knopfler (the singer) was. Add in the video (in a time when computer graphics were very primitive) and it’s really one of those great stories.
Not sure this is the cause in these cases, but it’s all too common in design by committee. Keeping the creative direction and vision in a single person is so damn important.
I went to some discos in Brazil in the 80s. People were frantically dancing to this song.
Edit: most of the time, the song that followed was “beds are burning” by midnight oil.
Yup. It’s a linedancing song just like “AC/DC - You Shook Me All Night Long”.