25or6to4 - The Monday Morning Memo

3:35 or 3:34AM: “25 or 6 to 4”
appeared on Chicago II and was written by organist Robert Lamm.

When asked the meaning of the song,
Lamm said, “It's not mystical. It's about staying up all night writing a song.”

Waiting for the break of day
Searching for something to say
Flashing lights against the sky
Giving up, I close my eyes
Sitting cross-legged on the floor
25 or 6 to 4

Staring blindly into space
Getting up to splash my face
Wanting just to stay awake
Wondering how much I can take
Should I try to do some more?
25 or 6 to 4

Feeling like I ought to sleep
Spinning room is sinking deep
Searching for something to say
Waiting for the break of day
25 or 6 to 4
25 or 6 to 4

“For the first time in history people feel that they are living inside a larger kind of ‘now,’ a ‘now’ that they are sharing with people whom they have never set eyes on. And this feeling is not shaped by direct contact with experience, by things as they are; it is entirely a product of things as they are presented. Of media. What started out as a tool, a combination package of public service and commercial entertainment, has slipped out of individual control and has taken on a life of its own. Now the image in the mirror moves and the body follows.

…News and information alone will no longer hold the mass audience. The appetite for sensation, for the giddy pacing that suggests that at last something interesting is really happening, has forced newscasters and publishers to keep one eye fixed on the salability of their ‘product.’ (Events as products – property – think of it!)”

- Sven Birkerts, An Open Invitation to Extraterrestrials, (1985)

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