Hidden Gems: Requiem for the Masses

I remember when I was a child who, like so many of us before we owned our own radios, enjoyed what my older siblings would play on their stereos. After all, everything I knew up to that point about popular music was what they placed on the platter. There's always a warm feeling of contented nostalgia remembering the bands and songs that they played that even if old to them, were new to me. I would memorize all the album covers, the names of the songs, the lyrics to the songs and, in some cases, I even memorized the label.

One of my fondest memories of that early exposure to popular music was by way of the Association. In retrospect they seem to be a sort of figurehead to the youth movement of the 1960's, a group that spoke of the counterculture (what we might call alternative today), the Vietnam anti-war movement and a band that spoke clearly and eloquently of the space and time in which their generation was found to be in.

By way of virtue and talent they had a slew of hits. Cherish (I gather it was a high school prom perennial), Windy, Never My Love and Along Comes Mary were the more popular selections from their output. But songs like Enter The Young and Everything That Touches You spoke of the deeper and more poignant resonations that they could translate from that period of youthful experience into song.

But for me, the picture that is painted most brightly in my memories from hearing the greatest hits package played when I was young is Requiem For The Masses. I had not, up to that point, heard such an atypical sound that could make such a deep impression. Indeed, to this day when I hear a track that tries to imbue the dissonance and inspiration of using an almost unearthly spiritual background vocal featuring Gregorian chant, I find it hard not to compare it back to what I consider the pinnacle of the genre.

Were that not enough, I've always found it fascinating that the lyrics, so carefully crafted, had somehow found a chord so deeply reverberating that they would elicit sympathetic feeling toward a bullfighter who molded his talent to becoming the best in his sport only to lie dying in the ring after his defeat by the very beast he was trained to best. It's also interpreted as a statement on a fighter who had died in the boxing ring. This became my first foray into social damnations and implications.

This track is both tender in its telling of a distinguished, respected, noble death, and bold, for the sweeping dramatization of the vocals that were so very groundbreaking and courageous in its time.

The Association as a band for a short time in the 1960's were unconventional and complex. They didn't prove to be long-lasting and didn't fit in with popular convention as time wore on and popular musical taste (being notoriously capricious as they always have been) moved on. But I am forever grateful to those days of being a musical voyeur into my older siblings collection for having been turned on to the deeper cuts of the Association.