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On the enduring popularity of Cream's ‘Sunshine of Your Love’: sonic synecdoche of the ‘psychedelic 60s’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 November 2008

Arnold S. Wolfe ,
Chuck Miller  and
Heather O'Donnell
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Extract

Few popular songs released over the past thirty years start so memorably: that bass riff, ominous, music for Jaws before there was Jaws, so insistent and unforgiving that in GoodFellas (1990), Scorsese has de Niro do nothing but smoke a ‘square’ and look – icily – off screen while the riff sounds its ten-note pattern. And you know what the combination of de Niro's look, those sounds and that smoke mean: somebody is going to get ‘whacked’. Cream's 1968 hit, ‘Sunshine of Your Love’, has been part of the shared culture of the world in which it has sounded for thirty years. In both Europe and America, ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ (SYL) continues to receive airplay today. At high school and college sporting events across the US, pep bands continue to play it (Dan Farris, Assistant Director of Bands, Illinois State University, personal communication, 5 March 1997). A band played it, too, in a 5 April 1997 episode of the NBC television network series, Profiler.

Type
Articles
Information
Popular Music , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , May 1999 , pp. 259 - 276
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

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