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kenoma.bsky.social
@kenoma.bsky.social
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last ding-dong of doom
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kenoma.bsky.social
last time for everything
The song lists a series of things that you will do for the last time. The examples are universal but sort of dudely, wide-ranging but white as fuck, and steeped in small town nostalgia: using a fake ID, making out in a car, asking SuperCuts for a mullet, last time for everything. What distinguishes these from things you do for the first time is not that it’s the last time but that you do not know it’s the last time when it’s happening. You think you will come back to this beach, have another summer, feel this love a second time. You won’t, last time for everything. This is what the boys of summer don’t yet know, and it is about them. Lit by heartland virtue, the song seems sort of sentimental and possibly boring. Then it scales up. At the end of the second verse, Paisley remembers “Watching Glenn Frey sing “Already Gone” at the Forum in LA.” Run the chorus, now gone dark: “last call, last chance, last song, last dance.” Frey was already gone two years. There’s a last breath for everyone. But we still don’t know what’s coming. We find out 100 seconds later. That could be it but it isn’t. With 21 seconds left, already too late for anything new to happen, after an almost bored “last time for everything,” we arrive at the final enumeration, there’s a last item for everything, “…hearing Prince sing “Purple Rain,”” but this he sings with a sudden abandon, breaking into falsetto that heads for the heavens as it trails off and I want to assure you it is the first Black reference in the entire song and you suddenly recognize that this is not a blind spot but a strategy, that the song’s naïveté and predictability and invocation of the fucking Eagles were all a long and patient way to make it okay for country to talk about this, except that all talk ends there, there’s a last line for everything, and it is at this moment that you can hear how the guitar’s rolling arpeggio has been calling down “Purple Rain” the whole time, since the very beginning, and that the song is the first great elegy for the last great star. It’s heartbreaking. Prince is dead and Glenn Frey is dead and Don Henley is the “Boys of Summer” guy. Your tomb is Paisley Park or the Hotel California or it’s Eighties Radio. Henley is there, “Boys of Summer” was the last time for him, the last song he made that mattered, he is there looking backward from the autumn of 1984 from which he would not escape, suspended there between never go out of style and already gone.
April 28, 2025 at 1:47 PM