“Conventionality belongs to yesterday”
Taken from the album Grease: Original Soundtrack
Also released on The Very Best Of Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons
US #1, UK #3
‘Grease’ is an odd one. A song from a movie released in the seventies, about the fifties, sung by a star from the sixties? Like the timeless mish-mash of circumstances, ‘Grease’ itself doesn’t belong to one decade or generation. These lyrics are for anyone who’s ever been a teenager, who has ever wanted to be a “rebel”, whether that means actually being a rebel or just wearing a leather jacket and smoking to look cool.
That huge disco riff that opens ‘Grease’ is absolutely fantastic, and drives along some of my favourite lyrics in any song.
“We start believing now that we can be who we are”
“They think our love is just a growing pain
Why don’t they understand?
It’s just a crying shame”
“We’ve got to be what we feel”
“We take the pressure and we throw away
Conventionality belongs to yesterday”
All of those are brilliant, and then there’s the chorus which proclaims “Grease is the word” and “Grease is the way we are feeling”. I don’t know exactly why grease represents the way we are feeling, but I know we’ve all felt a bit grease at times.
Nostalgic and forward-looking all at once, ‘Grease’ stirs up all kinds of feelings making this one of the best examples of serious quality disco. Not only is this the best song from the whole musical, it also holds up the best years later, and hasn’t been weakened by overexposure despite being a number one hit. And it was so good they put it on the soundtrack twice.
