Did You Know: Long Time starts with Foreplay?
In the best piece of neuro/narco-sarcastic retrospective rock writing I’ve read in the past several weeks — The Benign Comedy: They love you Long Time — erstwhile nasty piano-bar raconteur cum rock historian, Paul Shrug writes:
But the version of “Long Time” you hear on the radio isn’t the full version. It’s the second part of a two-part, combined song: “Foreplay/Long Time.” “Foreplay” is an instrumental prelude featuring 12,000 electric guitars, crashing drums, a bassist and an apocalyptic organ. (It should go without saying that there’s an organ on Boston as well.) The song is called “Foreplay” because it’s the tantalizing appetizer before the main dish, which is the pop hit “Long Time.”
The term “foreplay” is also used in sexual applications, referring to a series of gropes and gesticulations necessary to prepare nerve sensors in the human body for copulative activities. In the United States, “foreplay” is mainly done in coastal areas, very infrequently in the Midwest, and not at all in the South. “Foreplay” is also the national sport of France.
It is also hard not to admire the author’s writing’s punctuation’s adept mimicry of aggressively experimental Foster-Wallacean serial possessive constructions (even, it could be suggested, besting Wallace by constructing said serial posessives from pop-cultural acronyms).
