The good thing about the eighties is I didn't hear the word potpourri until then, and I think that's what the eighties were as far as music. You've got the old school hip-hop sound. You've got the hair-band stuff. You got the new wave stuff.
The classic keyboard sounds that instantly identify a song as being from the eighties?
And the drum machines and stuff, like with the Cars, which is one of my favorites. That's what I was calling new wave. Everything is usually twenty years back, and I'll give you an example. When I was growing up in the seventies, Happy Days was a big show and it hearkened back to the fifties.
In the eighties, a lot of sixties acts were having hits. You had Gary U.S. Bonds having top twenty hits. You got Don McLean, of course he's mainly early seventies, but a lot of sixties acts were doing pretty decent in the eighties having some revisits there. The Beatles were having hits again off of reissues or medleys. Everything is in twenty year increments. So, right now were primed for the eighties.
I think the eighties got launched a little bit prematurely in the early nineties. Some of the shows and things and music because our age group really wanted that to happen. I think for awhile, just doing the show, there was a lull with the eighties because it just got launched too early.
People weren't ready for it?
Right, I don't think people were ready for it. Then it took off like gangbusters. Every commercial you see these days, like Geico remaking "Somebody's Watching Me," or movies coming out with eighties songs in the background. There's a lot of eighties.
And in current music you have a lot sampling, in hip-hop and other genres, that is coming straight from the eighties.
It's funny. I always think it's very unique because a lot of the hip-hop artists will use artists that you wouldn't think they'd be listening to. A lot of that is actually white, pop bands or rock. Tone Loc started it actually. "Funky Cold Medina" was part of a Foreigner song, "Hot Blooded." I think it's very unique and cool that a lot of the songs being sampled are by artists that you wouldn't think that artist would listen to. It's just an art form.
I have a lot of kids and there's a lot of TV today that I don't let them watch. But I do go buy Alf, The Greatest American Hero, The A-Team, Silver Spoons; some of these shows that I know I can put a DVD in and just walk away.
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