Musical Youth

Thanks to my irrational love of old DJ tapes, I recently came across one from the summer of 1985. This particular tape was (technical term) "unscoped", meaning it was the whole show, music included. This meant that in addition to hearing the DJ's show, I also heard all those "current" hit songs of July 1985, and soon I was more engaged by the music than by the DJ's show. Nothing against this particular DJ (one of my idols), but I had stumbled upon an awkward personal musical phenomenon.

Those summer pop songs from your childhood, the ones that come on the radio (if they ever come on the radio) and immediately take you back to being a little kid and give you that good feeling. Speaking of irrational love, I should not like these songs, not if you consider my tastes in music. I like rock music, from all eras, but when it comes to the 80s, I find that there isn't all that much real rock in the decade that I like, and what I do like never made the radio because it was stuff like The Cure and The Pixies that was off the radar during those years (although Depeche Mode was on the radio in '85 so not a total loss). So critically speaking, it makes no sense, but when the heart rules the mind (a little reference to GTR there... incidentally a song that doesn't make my list), you tend to judge a song's worth on what it means to you rather than if it's any "good". This is particularly a problem now that such songs tend to come up on "classic hits" radio stations, a format name that was conceived because nobody from my generation wants to admit that songs from the 80s should be considered "oldies".

Case in point: at the end of this particular tape, the last song played was "Who's Holding Donna Now" by DeBarge. There is no logical reason why I should like this song. AT ALL. It's a fluffy little faux-R&B pop ballad, one of many from that time period. And yet, after hearing it the other day, I can't get the damn song out of my head! That probably explains how it went Top 10 in the summer of '85, although it doesn't explain how you would never hear it on the radio now, and it certainly doesn't explain how quickly El DeBarge's career went down the crapper after "Who's Johnny?"

If you're around my age, think back to the summer of 1985 and the various artists you heard on the radio: Tina Turner, Bruce Springsteen, Kool and the Gang, the Pointer Sisters, Chicago. All artists with name value who had been around for a while, but maybe not putting out their best work when you think critically. I mean "Born in the USA" was not Springsteen's best album, it was the one that sold the most copies. Kool and the Gang did funk anthems like "Jungle Boogie" and "Ladies Night", but when they put out "Joanna"... dear god, sellout city. And then they followed it up with more ear-candy-but-NOT-funky hits, all with one-word titles... "Cherish"... "Fresh"... "Victory"... And Chicago? Years past their rocking prime, doing power ballads or similarly pop-not-rock songs like "Along Comes a Woman." The mid-80s were chock full of this stuff... and people went along with it. Somehow, Kool and the Gang and DeBarge kept hitting #1 on the R&B chart, and somehow the #1 spot on the Rock chart was going to Sting and Don Henley and "We Built This City". But for whatever reason, if "We Don't Need Another Hero" or "Hard Habit to Break" is playing on the radio, I have to stop and listen to it. On the surface, this should make no sense...

I blame this all on my sister. When you have an older sister, she controls the radio, and plays de facto Music Director for the radio station that is your life at that time. There were certain things I could hear, and certain things I could not. Van Halen? For the most part, verboten. Too "heavy metal" (remember, this was before suburbia had really heard of Metallica or hair metal)... maybe we could listen to "Jump", but that was about it. I think I was in middle school before I knew there was a Van Halen before "1984". Anyway, after hearing "Cherish" and Cyndi Lauper's "All Through the Night" and Ashford & Simpson's "Solid" and the like over and over and over again on the radio, they somehow fused themselves to that 6-year old's feeling of innocence and now when I hear those songs, I'm 6-year old me again and I HAVE to hear the whole song, or download it... but I won't turn the speakers up and blast it, because frankly I'm embarrassed to like it.

Of course, now that I'm much older, it's interesting to think back to that summer and what we didn't know about the artists on the radio at that time. Whitney Houston's first album was out... a terrific debut album (and again, that's not my type of music). We had no idea that she'd end up destroying her voice with drugs. Madonna... yeah, we really had no idea what she was going to do in the next 20 years. "Voices Carry" by 'Til Tuesday... GREAT song. Then, the band wound up being a one-hit wonder, and lead singer Aimee Mann turned into an underappreciated indie folk rock icon of the 90s. And when you're 6, you don't know what the songs are really about. "Saving All My Love for You" by Whitney Houston? A song about sex. "Voices Carry"? A song about domestic violence. And the day you're old and smart enough to realize that's what the song is about... whoa, it spins your head around.

And it's kinda funny... the songs that have been identified as THE HITS of that time period have now been overplayed so damn much on Top 40, then Adult Contemporary, and now "classic hits" stations in the 25 years since that I can't stand to hear them now. It's only the more obscure stuff that was big then, but people somehow realized in the years after that they weren't really that good. Apparently, since I was only 6 at the time, I never realized that, but I can't be alone in this regard. Now, seriously, I need to get this DeBarge song out of my head...