Jan 13

Jan 13 The crepuscular vision of the Chi-Lites

WARNING

A prescription is required before listening to the music on this radio show podcast.

That is how Sinatra’s Where Are You LP was described, but it is even more true about the music of the Chi-lites. And particularly true about their A Lonely Man album, from which three songs are featured on this radio show.

This broadcast makes an unlikely pairing of the Chi-lites music with the overlooked early 20th-century Italian art movement known as crepuscular poetry.

The crepuscular poets revelled in and embraced despair and isolation in its full totality. Not shunning it, but actually turning towards its languid beauty.

The movement never gained the fame of other Italian art forms such as futurism and metaphysical art. But its practitioners discovered their own form of modernism. Many of the crepusculari poets perished from the same disease – consumption. Perhaps this is one explanation of the movement’s obscurity.

This Chi-lites music sounds like it could have only been made in Chicago. The underrated singer/songwriter Eugene Record carried his crepuscular vision of desolation to the furthest heights of isolation.

It’s hard to imagine that many of these songs were hits, being composed of cries of disassociation and detachment.

Music for the cold windy winter days and nights. Let’s freeze with style and joy.