Song of the Day 9/15: World Party, “Way Down Now”

The TV watching public (which is everybody but me, basically) is in a tizzy. The streaming services that have replaced cable TV, which replaced broadcast TV, are slashing programming, removing archived shows and pulling the plug on green-lighted productions, all because subscriber growth has slowed.

Yeah, that’s the ticket — raise prices and reduce product, a certain path to growth. Having worked in an industry that tried that approach and has mostly disappeared, I have to ask: Is our corporations learning? Signs point to no.

Karl Wallinger wrote this back when a few broadcast networks still played an outsized role in TV programming. It appeared on 1990’s “Goodbye Jumbo,” an LP he recorded mostly himself before he assembled a band for touring purposes. They appear in the video amid a barrage of garbage, not the most subtle visual metaphor.

“Goodbye Jumbo” was lauded by critics. Q magazine named it album of the year, and though pop-hating crank Robert Christgau hated it, it was No. 15 in the Village Voice’s year-end poll. This song didn’t reach the Hot 100 as a single and just scraped the bottom of the UK charts, but hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Modern Rock chart.

World Party put out four LPs in the ’90s, but Wallinger suffered a brain aneurysm in 2001 that took him five years to recover from. He’s done some touring and released archival material since then, but hasn’t had a new album since 2000’s “Dumbing Up.”

Wallinger is a huge Beatles fan. His cover of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” was one of the tunes on the “Way Down Now” maxi-single.