Well, yes and no. At the time The Iliad was composed, the legend of Aeneas founding Rome hadn't yet been formed. In the Iliad itself, Aeneas is destined only to be the leader of the survivors of Troy.
When I first started this Sharing Music I Like project, my intent was to share songs that I've either newly discovered, or songs that were generally obscure.
Now that I'm a few years into this project, however, I'd like to pivot to sharing songs that I've loved for a long time, including songs that are not so obscure.
Which I guess raises the question: how obscure is A Change Is Gonna Come? I mean, on the one hand, it's one of the most beloved soul songs from the 1960s. On the other hand, it never gets any radio play.
I grew up on oldies stations in the 1980s and 1990s, and I never heard this played on the radio. So my take is that unless you are particularly into old soul music, you might never discover this song. And if so, hopefully this blog post will help you discover this wonderful song.
But what's your take on it, dear reader? Have you heard this song before? How did you discover it? Did you ever hear it on the radio? Leave a comment and let me know.
And does anyone know why this song is never on the radio?
The first time I remember hearing this song, or at least noticing it, was in 2001 when I was re-watching Malcolm Xin Japan.
For whatever reason, Malcolm X is a movie that took me a few times to really appreciate. The first couple times I watched it, I felt a bit exhausted by the long run time of the movie. It's a movie you really have to be in the right mood to appreciate, because the pacing of the movie is slow. But the third time I watched it, I was settling into the slow pacing of the movie, and I began to appreciate just how powerful the movie was.
Now, if you've seen the movie, you know that at the end of the film, the movie essentially just stops so that A Change Is Gonna Come can play. It's the kind of pacing decision that exasperated me the first couple times I saw the movie, but when I re-watched it the 3rd time, I was able to appreciate it. And I noticed what a beautiful song it was.
This was back in 2001, when the Internet was still in its infancy, so it took me some time to actually track down what the name and singer were for this song. There was no Wikipedia to go to, no Youtube to search, and no reddit to ask.
I bought the soundtrack to Malcolm X (which I was actually able to find in a CD store in Japan) solely to get a copy of that song, and then was disappointed when that song wasn't on the soundtrack.
[Note: The Wikipedia article for Malcolm X (soundtrack) lists A Change Is Gonna Come as track 14 on the soundtrack, but it was definitely not on the Malcolm X soundtrack I bought in 2001. Perhaps there were different versions of the soundtrack released? I also don't know why A Change Is Gonna Come wouldn't be included, but perhaps it was a rights issue?]
Anyway, after several Internet searches, I did figure out that name and artist of the song from the end of Malcolm X, and then was able to buy a copy of Sam Cooke's greatest hits in Japan. Then, once I had finally tracked this song down, for several years afterwards, I became a big evangelist for this song.
I shared it with my old Calvin friend Brett, and my JET friend Ryan (neither of them had ever heard this song before, both of them loved it immediately.)
I used this song in my English classes in Japan, and have gone on to use it in my classes in Cambodia and Vietnam. See:
This is a reread. I originally read it in high school. But as this is my first time reviewing it on this blog, according to my new rules, I'm doing this as a video only review.
[Note: This is another video where I got cut off by the 30 minute time limit on my camera. There's a lot more that I could have said about this book, but I ran out of time.]
I've decided to subsume my Sharing Music I Like Index into a more general Music Reviews Index. There are a couple reasons for this:
1) Labelling these posts as "reviews" helps fit the current theme of this blog, and allows me to list these posts as one of my Reviews Indexes.
2) It also allows me to include my posts about songs or albums that were a bit more on the critical side--e.g. here, here and here.
My other review projects are comprehensive (e.g. every single book I read or movie I watch has to be reviewed). But in this case, obviously I'm not going to attempt to review every single song I hear. I'll just post about music as I feel like it.
