25 Days To Dudes: "World Of A King"

As Part of the '25 Days To Dudes' promotion, I will be posting an entry here about each of the 25 featured songs every day until DUDES official release November 15. If you have not already, please download the collection from the widget to your right. It's free!


WORLD OF A KING

“World Of A King” was the first single off my 1999 debut album, The Luxury Of Time. A couple of weeks after it went to radio, I was asked to go back into the studio and re-record the word ‘forked’ in the first line because people had begun calling stations, insisting that the word sounded like ‘fucked.’ At the time, I remember engaging in an argument with the record company about fixing the line, something about whether or not it would mess with the integrity of the lyric. I was extremely invested in my own opinion of the song.

These days it’s tough to pull your head out of your ass. We are constantly reassured of the importance of our own opinions and encouraged to express them as much as possible. Update your Facebook page. Tweet. Link-in. Etc. As I write, there are untold numbers of programmers creating more even social networking sites that will offer us even more ways by which to express our individuality. These sites will, of course, also create even more space for advertisers to sell us products that, ultimately, encourage us to buy and do the exact same shit as everyone else. But that’s another story.

Listening now, that first line of “World Of A King” does sound like I sang ‘fucked.’ I don’t think there is an inherent problem with the word ‘fucked’ but, in context, it created the wrong feeling for that part of the song. It sounded gross, vulgar, and seemed to be ruining the whole thing for some people. So why would I have wanted to endanger the possibility of someone enjoying the entire song to preserve one little mispronounced word? Because I was utterly convinced that people had to hear it my way or no way at all. I thought that my experience with the song was more important than theirs. This was a terrible mistake.

It is easy to shout our opinions from the top of a mountain in a desert. It does not matter if they are good or bad, relevant or passé, because no one ever hears them. But the satisfaction of having an opinion is not found in just having it; it is realized by seeing how it interacts with other people’s ideas, how it becomes part of a larger, collective discussion and how it ultimately affects the collective consciousness. This is friction, this is progress, this is evolution.

I have to respect other people’s opinions because all of mine are built on, or around, theirs.

“World Of A King” pretty much tanked at Top 40 radio. Later, after “Robert Bradley’s Postcard” had been officially released as the second single from The Luxury Of Time, an influential radio station in Chicago inexplicably added it to their play list. This inspired RCA to pull back its entire marketing roll-out of “Robert Bradley's Postcard” and re-release “World Of A King.” So, “World Of A King” was actually the first and second single from The Luxury Of Time, I guess. It was the 90’s.