Briefly, on Madcon’s “Beggin”

Let’s get the following out of the way: I am impossibly uncool, a situation only worsened by my age, which ticks upward at a truly terrifying rate no matter what I try to do to stop it. I’m not driving a sports car yet, but I did commit to shaving my head from basically now until eternity immediately after my wife and teenaged daughter made snotty comments about allegedly thinning hair.

“We were kidding!” they protested after I emerged with a shorn dome but the damage has been done. Never again will I risk the possibility of my hair being the reason that I’m regarded as an old. But like a sandcastle being built against an incoming tide, there’s no stopping the reality of what’s coming. Which is how I ended up sitting in a booth at a chain restaurant that I like – take me away, sweet death! – listening to somebody called Madcon* singing something called “Beggin” enjoying myself immensely.

“What’s this,” I asked my wife, but she shrugged. She hadn’t heard it either.

As nearly as I can tell, it’s a one-hit wonder that might not have been much of a hit. It was featured in a movie I didn’t see, and seems to trade heavily in nostalgia. It’s that last part that got me – listen to that hook! That’s a great hook! It harkens back to something I might imagine having heard in the mid 1970s, a soulful wail coupled with driving beat and rhythmic handclaps. I don’t know enough to know if its tribute or theft or a mix of the two but I frankly don’t care. It’s music that works.

Even in my advancing age, even with the aforementioned thinning hair, even as the parent of a teenager who aggressively rolls her eyes at me, I can hear that hook and get totally taken with it and I suppose knowing that makes the slow decline of everything else easier to endure.

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*As you might have predicted, Madcon is a Norwegian group.