RP: hipster braggart or musical philanthropist?

It's not the tragic death of a family member, or even anyone I know, or even a death at all. But it sure as hell feels like it.

So yesterday (or maybe Tuesday, they all blend together lately) I had my Pandora making it happen so I could drown out the pathetic environment I work in. Pretty much like any other day. On a whim I switched from Patrick Dunn radio, the station I'd been listening to for weeks, to my Dance Rock station, inspired by such jewels as The Radio Dept., M83 and Fujiya & Miyagi, and on came this song from an 80s compilation by a group called Kitty Hawk. I was so intrigued I began researching the group (Pandora offered no help). Well I was lead in about nine different directions. On top of the flight nostalgia, North Carolina travel sites and bits about the Navy ship, there's apparently three different bands with the name Kitty Hawk. An 80s group, a more recent 4-piece folk group out New York and from what I can tell a couple of dudes from DC that can play about 267 instruments each. I gathered I had initially been inspired by the 80s group, but my hunt led me to the Myspace page of the latter.

I don't know what happened, but the second I heard what their little player was offering I knew I was going to love it. Luckily some were listed as downloadable and I expanded my search to find other material by the same guys. They have a web page, but aside from that their existence is nil. And to boot, from context clues on their myspace I got the feeling these guys had just broken up less than a month ago. Even without that information their music was heartbreaking enough, but to listen to it and think that these songs somehow never took off with enough people to make the effort worth it, it just sucks.

I thought of sitting on this for a while, but every time I loop through the eight songs I managed to find, I get the itch to tell someone about it. Kitty Hawk is now easily one of my favorite bands. And as noted previously I've only heard 8 songs. It's as if Great Lake Swimmers called up Pinkerton and asked if they could meet up, and Pinkerton was like "I don't know, Rivers' new album just came out, I'm supposed to stay in," and GLS was all like "Cmon, you're beautiful," so she did and they watched some weird independent movie that neither of them cared about and they didn't even touch the popcorn, they were both too concerned with like GLS' smooth minstrel fingers touching Pinkerton's butterfly tattoo or some shit but finally they both broke down and fucked and had a musical baby, and they named that baby fucking Kitty Hawk. Listen to them. I'll make you a CD later.

R. Petti signing off for the weekend, or possibly longer.

http://www.myspace.com/kittyhawkrock
kittyhawkrock.com