Reacharound: “Big Chair”

Sometimes the limn of culture described by your memory is wholly off the mark. To wit: As recently as last week, I remembered this song as being absolutely inescapable in 1996, when in fact it wasn’t even popular enough to eventually warrant its own page on Wikipedia. Less often is the construction of that assumption traceable to a series of distinct moments—backsolving the geneses of one’s own cultural history requires some preternaturally burly memory recall and a stiff dram of humility, after all. But that’s my stock and trade here, and sure enough, in trying to decide what to say about this song, I realized precisely why it held such false prominence for me.

1. Up late studying, I heard this song for the first time. Morning and afternoon radio DJs were terrible at telling you who a given artist was, or even what any particular song was called, but at night there was a higher aggregate of DJs who gave a shit, and so I learned: Reacharound. Big Chair. Studying, as I had been, from a textbook, there was no paper handy to jot this information down, and I could feel it being actively squeezed out of my short-term memory in favor of information about the Krebs cycle, and in a last-ditch effort to retain the data, I scrawled it on the wall next to my pillow, where I would lay my head nearly every night for the next four years.
   
   
2. My girlfriend and I had an argument over the repeated “Oi! Oi!” chant in the chorus. She argued that it was a football chant, because they were Australian. I argued that it was “a punk thing,” despite the fact that I was (and, frankly, still am) less punk than a copy of The Fountainhead resting on an Eames chair. We OF COURSE had this argument in her parents’ car on the way to see Titanic.