LifeSavers Underground's "Carry Me to Cairo."

I live in Cairo right now. Most of the music I hear doesn't inspire me very much. I just don't seem to have much of this Arabic-sort-of music in me. Its beats throb and its melodies seem haphazard to me. I probably just don't get it; I'm really ignorant, it seems, of how it works. 

Back in 1993 or so, my sister bought a copy of LifeSavers Underground's Wakin' Up The Dead. I listened to it a lot and inherited the CD when she left for the convent in 1997.  The album has a few hits ("House of Love," "The Bomb," "Ocean Blue," and "Wakin' Up The Dead") and a few misses ("Revival Nineties," "Nineties Tease," and "Carry Me to Cairo").

"Carry Me to Cairo" is one of Mike Knott's more naïve tracks. Its impression of "Cairo" appears almost entirely based on Sunday School impressions of Egypt, with perhaps a little bit of influence from elementary school Social Studies. The pharaohs he speaks of might have spent very little time in Cairo or Giza, and his request to be "carried" there seems to be more of a request to be taken to another place, another time. It's kind-of built on a myth, sort of like the era of "traditional marriage."

Nonetheless, in spite of how little I like it, since I live near Cairo right now, the song ends up stuck in my head on a regular basis. Fortunately, "The Bomb" gets stuck in my head more often than "Carry Me to Cairo."

The feedback-guitarwork, perhaps performed by Chris Colbert, is probably the song's most endearing element. 

If you like what you hear at all, skip Wakin' Up The Dead and listen to Cash In Chaos World Tour or The Grape Prophet, both albums that I've continually enjoyed throughout the years. I'll probably write about those two albums on another day.