Hotel

No one commented on this song? This is one of the best pop songs of the '70s! It's about as politically incorrect as you can get, at least on first hearing ("We got a big black mama in a tree/she gonna cook us/she gonna call up the rest of the tribe..." imagery straight out of one of the now-banned Warner Bros. cartoons of the '30s and '40s that depicted thick-lipped, bone-in-the-nose, cooking-missionaries-in-a-big-black-pot, grass-skirted African natives), but the riff, the percussion, and the clever lyrical delivery are irresistible. What does the song mean? I don't know, but I would guess that 10cc, an art-rock band with serious aspirations that nevertheless had a terrific sense of humor and never stopped poking fun at itself and everyone else (word to solemnly "serious" bands of today: yes, I'm talking about YOU, Pearl Jam/Eddie Vedder, Green Day/Billy Joe Armstrong, and especially YOU, U2/Bono, and the kings of rock solemnity in the current era, Radiohead/Thom Yorke- you might try exploring the absurd side of all the political, social, and artistic themes you take on, if you have any capacity for that, any sense of humor AT ALL), are making comments about the easy pleasure rich white people, especially Americans (this was 1974, toward the tail-end of the Vietnam war era) take in their vacations, their tendency to view other places and "native" peoples in the world as objects for their own amusement and pleasure, the legacies of European/American imperialism, and about the equally-simplistic left-wing/Marxist critiques of the imperialist world view. Sorry, I know that's a long/complicated sentence that should have been cut down to size, but my point is that, in this song, NOBODY escapes 10cc's wit and scrutiny and critique. And that's the beauty of it.

Thanks you, Mr. SM!