An officemate is listening to a bad rock station on the radio. They were playing Asia's one and only hit. I've got a question for y'all: was Asia the worst prog-rock band in history, or just a particularly bad Journey clone? I once bought one of their albums (Alpha) in vinyl format, threw out the record, and pinned the sleeve up on my bedroom wall as a bit of artwork. Never has a band had better album art and worse music...

I went to find the lyrics to that song and discovered that the first two hits were on sites with the most obnoxious pop-up blizzards I've seen outside of a free porn site. The above link is relatively clean. I had forgotten that Asia had been a prog supergroup composed of refugees from Yes, King Crimson, and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. What the hell happened to prog rock in the late 70s? Was it coke? Jimmy Carter? Supply-side economics? Paul Lassiter?

Hah! Murray Head! I love "One Night in Bangkok"! One of these days I'm going to have to track down the rest of Chess. He's my favorite Judas from Jesus Christ Superstar.