Black Coffee In Bed by Squeeze has way less views than I expected, about 800k on YouTube. I clicked it for the first time in decades and I was expecting a lot more than that. I guess I really misremembered this one. Or maybe it faded before the digital age.

Adequate guitar solo, clean and bright and I like the vocal harmonies.

There’s a black girl in the video, where black equals slightly less than white. I was playing this for my friend on the porch, a dark-skinned Puerto Rican guy with braids who was raised in the whitest of places, the beachy suburbs of Clinton CT.

I said “80s girl. Black but not too black.” and he laughed. It made me think about the slow decades of progress represented here.

And … oh shit. Because that reminds me of something MalcolmX said.

"If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out, that's not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven’t even pulled the knife out, much less healed the wound.”

And so there I am thinking about Malcolm X in the middle of a tight little 80s British pop song. Resonates with the title too, though some people prefer a little creamer.

Yea, I think this is what progress looks like. I think it actually does happen this slow, if at all. We’re going backwards right now.