By today's standards, childcare in the 70s and 80s would have gotten our parents arrested. I watch a lot of "body cam" police videos on YouTube (shut up it's fascinating) and I've seen a fair number of parents put in handcuffs for child abandonment. This one woman went to visit another apartment in the same apartment complex while her 13 year old was in charge of the 9 year old. They were both asleep. Ummmm...yeah. Should I…
This latest Facebook questionnaire asks you to name the top ten records of your teen years. This one sparked more than a few, shall we say, enthusiastic discussions among my social network. There were some near-Unfriending incidents. Granted, mine is a particularly musically-charged gang of misfits. Dear friends absolutely demolish each other over hot button issues such as whether or not Billy Squire got robbed. (Update: Don't @ me.)
Long ago in a galaxy we 40-somethings refer to as "childhood," we built a cherry Kool-Aid world with rad high tech toys like Lite Brite, Etch-a-Sketch, and Slinky...a popular (*cheap*) birthday present. Imagine every one of us rug rats fighting over a toy you play with on the stairs . We made our own fun, too. Get a pair of tube socks and you could slide across the linoleum, or shuffle out some sweet static on the shag carpet. I'm …
Look, I get why everyone is gleefully clicking and sharing and tagging me. Did you see? You gotta see . I get it. In my circle I'm known to be a flag-waving, card-carrying, true-blue Generation X pop culture maven, my latchkey kid, TV-addled brain way overloaded with massive volumes of useless trivia in such subjects as Schoolhouse Rock , Spandex, when to use gel versus mousse, Madonna, Ronald Reagan's policies, the right way to make a mi…
From ages 8 to 12, or from the self-titled debut to Diver Down , I was a Van Halen poseur. I pretended to like them. During this period I drew the band logo on my schoolbook covers, and I made my own shirt with an iron-on transfer from the Skate Odyssey shop (you had to get a baseball jersey for an iron-on transfer, or just don't even bother.) In reality I hated baseball jerseys and I couldn't have named one Van Halen song. Why all this p…
Culture Club got so popular so fast that I needed to rouse myself from my summer of 2016 grim languor and actually do research. Billboard charts show that, yes, these guys were the first band since the Beatles to chart with 4 songs at once. No wonder it's all a blur.
"Do You Really Want to Hurt Me" was the first charting single off Culture Club's debut album Kissing to be Clever (1982), then they followed quickly with Colour B…
Cyndi Lauper arrived on the scene with all the gentle politeness of a flash flood. One day she was just suddenly everywhere, blowing up MTV with "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun," the first single off her first record, She's So Unusual . Cute as a button with that unruly mop top of streaky orange hair, Cyndi's synth pop, throaty voice and blended motif of punk and old Hollywood glam appealed to just about everybody. Style meant a lot …
Where were you when music changed your life?I was in my room in our pink ranch house, listening to Casey Kasem's American Top 40 on my boom box radio, which is a very, very old sentence to say. Along with the TV shows Dance Fever and Solid Gold , Casey Kasem was expanding my musical range beyond that of my parents' influence. Not to imply that my parents have poor taste. Quite the opposite. My parents crush it for sorting out the best mu…
I was 15 when "Take On Me" hit the American airwaves, along with a killer video that made this Norwegian pop song into an instant classic. It was one of two singles off A-ha's first record, Hunting High and Low , but most people are hard pressed to name the other one.
"Take On Me" is a sonic transport 30 years back in time to the spectacular corn & cheese laden decade of roller skates, legwarmers and big hair. Anchore…
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