Burning Love
I Stole Your Love (1977) and Deep Purple's Burn (1974) are comparable on more than just a purely musical level to Makin' Love (1976) and Led Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love (1969), if you know what I mean.
To call a spade a spade, I am once again concerned with very specific fan automatisms as soon as certain song titles become the central object of a thematic discussion. And that's something that occasionally reminds me of this Arnold Schwarzenegger flic, in which he's an undercover policeman on the trail of a really bad guy and, with great effort, mimes the pedagogue in an educational institution for better integration into our culture for young human beings of pre-school age. Whereupon, on his first day, a self-confident little boy immediately points out to him that boys have a penis and girls have a vagina.
But apart from the simple model of another band's song and predetermined learned knowledge, I am of course also concerned here with the expansion of Paul Stanley's own musical foundation, and his appropriation and addition of a rhythmic standard that has already manifested itself in many ways in popular musical culture, since the Fascinating Rhythm (1924).
And without wanting to go backwards and historically pick up on Fred Astaire and its jazz and Broadway anchored core, I would just like to give a little further indication, looking forward from Love Gun (1977), that it was not the last time that Paul, the developing songwriter, knew how to pick up on this methodology. A wonderful, if not fabulous, example of a even further progression of Fascinating Rhythm, or Burn, or I Stole Your Love, in a highly appealing interlaced elaboration can be found, for example, on Animalize (1984), which I would like to talk about in a more far-reaching form at another time. Of course.
If I were to give in to the temptation to throw a prime example of regressive songwriting into the mix, I would end up back at their last studio album Monster (2012). Or probably any other. But that's exactly the beauty of this band. With them, front or back, progression or devolution, the present or the past don't really play a decisive role.
And if you put all these factors aside, isn't this really the key to bliss?
I Stole Your Love (1977)
Burn (1974)
