179. 40 Fathoms

179. "How Deep Is Your Love" by the Bee Gees

I have always liked dance songs from the 70s that have a rich "wall of sound" with orchestral arrangements and choruses sung in harmony. The Bee Gees knew I wasn't the only one, so they wrote a slew of songs to try to satiate our desires for these kinds of songs. But they only made things worse, as our desire only grew with each disco hit that they churned out. We couldn't get enough of the Bee Gees in the 70s, and we discoed in excess, causing a negative cultural backlash against the boogie that even managed to spawn its own catchphrase, “Disco Sucks.” Today, even the Bee Gees themselves have become the subject of national ridicule by the likes of Jimmy Fallon, Justin Timberlake, and Barry Gibb on Saturday Night Live. Despicable!

SNL: Barry Gibb Talk Show

Well, well, well…we're paying the price now for our disco avarice, aren't we. But there is no use in crying over spilt milk. The damage is done, and the musical history of the 70s can't be rewritten, so let's just enjoy us some of that wall-of-sound Bee Gees music and let our minds go back to the day when all you needed for a music video was a single camera to film your heads while you and your brothers lip-synced straight on into the camera and walked your dogs in circles. You may now click on the link below and behold the somber faces and impressive walking skills of the Bee Gees!

YouTube: How Deep Is Your Love

I like this song for its smooth, full-bodied sound, especially during the chorus, which features some very nicely balanced layered harmonies that do not require a balls-in-the-vice-grip falsetto voice for the sing-along. Whenever I hear this song, I'm taken back to the days of my early youth, laying on my bed at night, looking at all that Bicentennial wallpaper in the lamp-light of a 40-watt yellow incandescent bulb, listening to this song on the little clock radio on my nightstand, and trying to figure out the question of how to measure the depth of love.

And only now, after over three decades of trying to come up with an answer on my own, I finally gave up and just Googled it. Turns out that the white-coated and bespectacled scientists that are in charge of defining the universal standard measurements for everything in existence have declared that the official way to measure the depth of love is in units called "fathoms." I guess it's all part of the metric system that those fools Mr. Divesti and Mr. Brown tried to ramrod down our throats in our 7th and 8th grade scientology classes. Why were they always trying to break us down when they all should let us be?