Ten For Today: Oxygen

Gary Higgins, Jean-Michele Jarre, Sweet, City Streets & Lorrie Lucas, The Halo Benders, Symbiosis, The Dishes, Willy Mason, Catfiish & The Bottlemen, Ludwig A.F.

(This is a lightly edited version of a post from a couple of years ago. I repeat myself, while embellishing. I am getting older. )

On this day in 1774, Joseph Priestly discovered “dephlogisticated air,” which would later be more elegantly renamed “oxygen,” by a French scientist. I mean, oxygen was around, but Priestly isolated it, and understood its elemental nature. He was a chemist, philosopher, and theologian (but, one assumes, not a poet). He was a religious “dissenter,” one who broke away from the Church of England, and a supporter of both the American and French revolutions, which meant at some point, he had to get out of Dodge, as it were. (What’s the Dodge equivalent in England? Leeds?) He emigrated to the United States and settled in Pennsylvania. He was a bit of a contrarian, as well as one of the founders of the Unitarian Universalist Church. Busy guy.

He also discovered carbonated water, but another guy (named Schweppes!) filed the patent, so there’s that.

Anyway, there aren’t really any songs about “dephlogisticated air,” so we will approach this a different way. Songs about oxygen are as ubiquitous as air, as they should be. Here are Ten For Today: Songs about Oxygen.

Connecticut’s Gary Higgins was convicted on a marijuana charge, and just before he reported to prison in 1973, he gathered some friends and recorded a beautiful album. With no one to promote it, the record disappeared, until the crate diggers found and revived it.

This is from Jean-Michele Jarre’s 1977 album Oxygene, which is one of those works that everyone seemingly hated when it came out, but in the rear-view mirror, it’s an important, perhaps canonical work of synth-pop that paved the way for others. It was also meant to be a statement on the environment, and there weren’t THAT many artists ringing that bell in those days.

This is kind of the granddaddy of oxygen songs, from 1978. Imagine if it had been named “Love is Like Dephlogisticated Air.”

I have no idea what this is, but I love it. Ah, 1983! I guess they must have been a Buffalo band. Maybe someone else knows.

The Halo Benders were a mid-90’s collaboration between Beat Happening’s Calvin Johnson and Built To Spill’s Doug Martsch – two pretty singular indie rock voices from out west (Olympia, Washington and Boise, Idaho, respectively.) This was released in 1994.

Oxygen seems to be big with the house/techno/dance crowd, and here is some evidence, from Chicago in 2000.

The Dishes were a Chicago band, and this is from 2002.

I THINK this first came out in 2004, but it seems to have been released several times, so hard to say definitively. He grew up on Martha’s Vineyard, where there might be more oxygen.

Here’s a 2016 entry by Welsh band Catfish and the Bottlemen, which is perhaps not very well rooted in science.

Finally, here’s some more techno/house, from a German DJ named Ludwig A.F. (LOL) in 2021.

That’s ten. Have a great day. Breathe. Be kind. #Resist. Just breathing can be resistance.

Joyce

*****************************

This Substack is free, unless you want to pay for it. Paying for it gives you access to the archive, which has almost 800 posts now. I promise I spend the money wisely. I might buy myself a caronated beverage. Either way, thanks for being here!