Pieties for the people

Why America? Their nascent legions of fans must understand intuitively, feeling this music’s pull on their lymph glands without needing or wanting to analyse it, but for those of us less than totally smitten by the omnipresent strains of “Horse With No Name,” it’s a knotty puzzle indeed. It’s easy to scream hype, of course; a friend of mine has actually deduced that since there were also new Neil Young and Crazy Horse albums due out at this time, the promulgation of a Youngish vocal called “Horse With No Name” was actually a dark Kinney plot to capitalize on that synchronicity. Somebody else assures me the song’s about heroin.