Song Of The Day 5/12/2014: The Raes - "School"

Quarterly Covers Report: The Raes were a husband-and-wife disco operation based in Canada. Cherrill grew up in Ontario but Robert grew up in Wales, which means the couple's annual Christmas cards were very polite but you couldn't pronounce a word of them. Thank you. Thank you. They stood as a shining, lone beacon of marital commitment in the fling-your-anklets-on-the-ottoman sexual escapades of the Disco Generation, until they divorced in 1980. They had minor hits with a dependable stream of disco nuggets like their cover of the chirping and fatalistic "Que Sera Sera," along with some original numbers so they could collect royalties.

Their oddest decision was to cover Sueprtramp's "School" in disco trappings. If you've never heard the original, and let's face it there's a fairly good chance you Millennials haven't, it's a slightly more watered-down complaint about the forced conformity of the British educational system than the kind Roger Waters and Morrissey tended to expound on. You may find the relentless disco beat a powerful replication of the fascist overtones and distressing pressure to acquiesce to arbitrary community standards as meted out by K-12 institutions. Or it may, in a phrase I discovered after stumbling upon old microfiche copies of the Osmond Fan Club newsletters, make you want to "boogie." Either way, good luck, you'll need it.