Sometimes all you need is “Love Shack.” The B-52s are all you need, in my reality, to end world war.

Granted, this column is the result of not only not being able to think of an actual topic, but also as a result of listening to the fabulous 1989 “Love Shack” in The Daily Eastern News newsroom.

It makes so much sense though. There’s something almost unexplainable when certain songs come on that send radiating shivers of fun down even the most stubborn spines.

It gives me a chance to forget that I have work to do the rest of the day and instead focus on the nasally vocals of “Hop in my Chrysler, it’s as big as a whale/and it’s about to set sail!” It makes you feel good is what it does.

Now let’s apply this Daily Eastern Newsical to a class at the university: World War I.

For what some call Europe’s Civil War, the first modern war, and for what I call the First World War, the war was one that was a build up in the making of fragile alliances and nationalistic struggle.

But “Love Shack” and the B-52s were nowhere to be found in that era. Now that I think about it, “Love Shack” fell in the same year the Berlin Wall fell down, so you could almost contribute the B-52s with that accomplishment.

After all, “Everybody’s movin, everybody’s groovin’ baby” does remind me of the hammers tearing down the wall to get to the other side .. OK, maybe I am stretching the boundaries of a single song. But I do know that for the three minutes or whatever that “Love Shack” bounces on, I do get lost and feel no pain.

This has so much more to do with music too. For example, following the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, Austria waited six weeks before acting on a way to essentially get back at Serbia.

In that time, Germany gave a blank cheque to Austria saying that it has Austria’s back in the event of war against Serbia.

In July, Austria issued the ultimatum to Serbia requesting ridiculous demands that ranged from putting prior restraint on their press to stopping certain Serbian social organizations to halting teaching of anything anti-Austrian.

In addition, the Serbs had two days to respond to the demands, to which they mostly did.

Unfortunately, the Austrians were unwilling to compromise.

My point in all of this is sometimes all you need is to relax, chill out, and hop in a Chrysler that’s as big as a whale.

I realize my argument that “Love Shack” solves all problems is at best crazy, but so is war.

War did look unavoidable in a lot of ways in World War I, as probably was in a lot of wars, but I will always side with a little diplomacy or “Love Shack” compared to killing to solve problems.

Kevin Kenealy is a senior journalism major. He can be reached at 581-7942 or at

[email protected].