It Sounded Cool in Junior High

Currently atop the long list of "Ways in Which I Am a Great Trial to Kate" is my odd obsession with VH1's "I Love the 80's". The shows are sort of a hanging curve over my pop-culture plate, and I find them weirdly hypnotic. If I stumble across it while channel-surfing, I'll sit and watch it, even if I've seen the episode in question three times before (for some reason, they show the same three or four years over and over).

This is, of course, largely a matter of the Golden Age of pop culture in general being twelve (1983, in my case)-- that's about the point where your tastes in music, books, clothes, and so forth stop being received wisdom from your parents, and start being a matter of active personal choice. However regrettable those choices may appear in retrospect, it's hard not to harbor a little bit of nostalgia for the major pillars of whatever era you came of age in.

There are a whole bunch of aspects of 80's culture that I never fully partook of-- I couldn't stand most of the top tv shows at the time, for example, so I have a hard time working up any enthusiasm for "Dukes of Hazzard" tributes-- but my fascination with ephemeral pop music was born in the early 80's, which accounts for my continuing fascination with Dexy's Midnight Runners...

This is all by way of a long lead-in to another mix tape post, mostly because we were talking about the VH1 show over the weekend, and I'm not feeling all that inspired to write about anything else. This isn't one of those deliberately random tapes, though-- this is my cheesey 80's mix tape, that I keep around for when I need comfort music of an especially dippy variety.

The tape actually has its origin in my sister's career as a competitive swimmer. Back in the mid-90's, she and the rest of the swim team were stuck in a hotel at some away meet in some desolate corner of the Midwest, and sometime during a long, strange, weekend, one of them phoned in and ordered the Totally Eighties collection that was being hawked on tv at the time. (They weren't actually aware of this until it showed up in their mailbox back on campus, but that's what happened...) She taped a selection of songs, and sent me a copy, and I edited it to replace some of the more ridiculous acts (Tone Loc, Billy Ocean) with other stuff I had lying around.

Here's what I ended up with:

Side One

• "Take On Me," a-ha. It's important to start a tape like this off with a bang, and there are few songs more spectacularly Eighties in nature than this, the synth-driven falsetto pinnacle of the Video Music Era.
• "Come On Eileen," Dexy's Midnight Runners. There was a ska-punk cover of this a few years ago by a band called Save Ferris. It's amazing how much the song is harmed by being able to understand the lyrics. The original is unbeatable.
• "Who Can It Be Now?," Men at Work. I always liked "Land Down Under" better, but it wasn't on the tape.
• "Good Girls Don't," the Knack. The other song by the guys who did "My Sharona." I always liked this one better, anyway.
• "Karma Chameleon," Culture Club. What can you say about this one, really?
• "In a Big Country," Big Country. Exhibit A in the argument that naming your band in your first single is the kiss of death.
• "Everybody Have Fun," Wang Chung. A song that is forever defined for me by hearing Kelsey Grammer as Frasier on Cheers recite the lyrics.
• "Jesse's Girl," by Rick Springfield. Kate was foolish enough to doubt that Lara Beaton and I could know all the words to this, this past weekend. And she paid the price for her lack of faith...
• "Always Something There to Remind Me," Naked Eyes. On Googling to check my memory of the band name, I was astonished to find this attributed to Burt Bacharach. I'm not sure why.
• "Missing You," John Waite. A song that always seemed to be on when I drove home late at night in the late 80's. A good one to sing along with in those circumstances...
• "Secret Separation," the Fixx. This was a filler track on a CD I bought in order to obtain some other tune ("Come On Eileen," I think), and I was surprised to discover that I knew and liked it.
• "Be My Yoko Ono," Barenaked Ladies. Not actually an 80's song, but goofy enough to fit, and short enough to fit in the gap at the end of the tape, which none of the actual 80's material I had on hand would do.

Side Two:

• "What I Like About You," the Romantics. One of the decade's most recognizable opening riffs. These guys never did cocaine. Nope, no way.
• "Centerfold," J. Geils Band. I actually got really sick of this song back when it was popular, but I recovered nicely.
• "She Blinded Me With Science," Thomas Dolby. So ridiculously weird, and weirdly ridiculous, that it's essential.
• "Magic," the Cars. The Cars Greatest Hits was probably the first CD I bought with my own money, and it's held up remarkably well. Their omission from VH1's catalog of 80's phenomena was a gross oversight.
• "99 Luftballoons," Nena. Retroactively altered forever by Grosse Point Blank, this is another song that benefits immeasurably from the fact that I don't speak German.
• "Once in a Lifetime," Talking Heads. "You may ask yourself, 'Why am I wearing such a very large suit?' You may ask yourself, 'Couldn't that suit be taken in a little?'"
• "Gloria," Laura Branigan. A song which would be really weird, paired with Van Morrison on the "Different Songs with the Same Title" mix tape...
• "Everybody Wants to Rule the World," Tears for Fears. A song which seemed to appear in every movie released in the latter half of the decade, but most memorably in Real Genius.
• "No Romance," the Rainmakers. An obscure song by a band with serious Mall Hair, that I didn't actually hear in the 80's. A friend had it on a tape in college, I liked it, and I picked the CD up for a buck in a cut-out bin at some point.
• "867-5309 (Jenny)," Tommy Tutone. It's probably indicative of something that you need to go to the second page of Google results before you see this one attributed properly. A classic one-hit wonder.
• "Sunglasses at Night," Corey Hart. Every girl in the ninth grade had the screaming thigh sweats for this guy, which got annoying. A similar effect barred Duran Duran from the tape, but this is such a dopey song, it'd be hard not to include it.
• "All I Need Is a Miracle," Mike and the Mechanics. Disposable pop from a Genesis side project, but it's not actively bad, and I couldn't think of anything to replace it with, so that's where it ends.

Hardly a comprehensive survey, but good for cornball nostalgia on long road trips. It's a good "stuck in traffic" tape, too, because it's hard for me to stay in a bad mood with these songs playing.

Article Author: Chad Orzel

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