Hotel California

I asked Tanim about it but then we didn’t finish the conversation. Does it ever happen to you folks that you suddenly remember an old song and keep thinking about it and then it kinda goes around. You hear it playing on the radio, in your coworkers PC or on a friend’s play list? Well…I’ve been remembering Hotel California a lot lately. Used to sing it all the time once upon a time (who didn’t!). I was thinking I had never really figured out what the song was about.

So I googled it and all sorts of explanations turned up. I really didn’t like the Satanic cult mumbo jumbo. Although those had the most enthusiastic reasoning based on facts and tit bits. They just didn’t cut it for me. This one made the most sense to me –

“The truth proves far less satisfying than the myriad rumors that have sprung up around this song.
Hotel California is an allegory about hedonism and greed in Southern California in the 1970s. At the time of its release, the Eagles were riding high in the music world, experiencing material success on a frightening level. Though they thoroughly enjoyed the money, drugs, and women fame threw their way, they were disquieted by it all and sought to pour that sense of unease into their music and to warn others about the dark underside of such adulation.
In a 1995 interview, Don Henley said the song "sort of captured the zeitgeist of the time, which was a time of great excess in this country and in the music business in particular." In another interview that same year, he referred to it as being about a "loss of innocence."
The album has as its underlying theme the corruption of impressionable rock stars by the decadent Los Angeles music industry. The celebrated title track presents California as a gilded prison the artist freely enters only to discover that he cannot later escape.
The real Hotel California is not a place; it is a metaphor for the west coast music industry and its effect on the talented but unworldy musicians who find themselves ensnared in its glittering web.”

Source: http://www.snopes.com/music/songs/hotel.htm

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