Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.It is \u201cthe most obvious song in the world, and the strangest\u201d, wrote Greil Marcus in his cultural history Lipstick Traces. It is a song that for all bar a few seconds uses just two chords \u2014\u00a0D and A, with the tiniest foray into E at the end \u2014\u00a0and whose subject is Route 128, the unlovely highway that loops around Boston, Massachusetts. It is a song whose own author has not performed it for decades, and who a couple of years ago dismissed a campaign in his home state to give it official recognition: \u201cI was saying I\u2019m in love with my own loneliness. Isn\u2019t that kind of narcissistic? It\u2019s true, you know and I meant it that way. It was a sort of a lonely, self-involved song.\u201dJonathan Richman was a Massachusetts teenager besotted with The Velvet Underground when he wrote \u201cRoadrunner\u201d. He hung around the band when they played in Boston, and moved briefly to New York to be part of their milieu, sleeping on their manager\u2019s couch: \u201cRoadrunner\u201d was, at heart, simply the Velvets\u2019 \u201cSister Ray\u201d rewritten to be about a ring road.He has said he wrote \u201cRoadrunner\u201d during his stay in New York because he was homesick. \u201cI just made it up for myself, really, just to make up this hypnotic chord guitar chord thing about how I felt about the loneliness of borrowing my father\u2019s car, which I did at 16 and 17, and driving around \u2014 and sort of being consoled by the lonely industrial parks, which felt as lonely as I felt.\u201dBut those who cover \u201cRoadrunner\u201d only borrow the car: the vehicle always belongs to Richman. In 2007, as a newspaper section editor, I sent the writer Laura Barton to drive every road mentioned in every version of \u201cRoadrunner\u201d. The resultant article in 2013 inspired a campaign in Massachusetts to make \u201cRoadrunner\u201d the official state rock song, led by state Rep Marty Walsh. And though that failed, state legislators keep on trying \u2014 it was a 2023 effort that prompted Richman\u2019s polite dismissal of the notion.As long as there is music, though, and cars to play it in \u2014\u00a0and as long as there are bored kids with nothing better to do on a Saturday night but drive through the suburbs for the sake of it \u2014 \u201cRoadrunner\u201d will endure. It is strange, but it really is obvious.Let us know your memories of \u2018Roadrunner\u2019 in the comments section belowThe paperback edition of \u2018The Life of a Song: The stories behind 100 of the world\u2019s best-loved songs\u2019, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by ChambersMusic credits: Sanctuary; Universal; Sony; Reservoir; Cleopatra; Fire<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.It is \u201cthe most obvious song in the world, and the strangest\u201d, wrote Greil Marcus in his cultural history Lipstick Traces. It is a song that<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":257659,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-257658","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=257658"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257658\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":257660,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257658\/revisions\/257660"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/257659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=257658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=257658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=257658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}