Tuesday, September 09, 2008

The 80's will NEVER die!

Charles posted this link to a mother-load of 80's music videos of ALL genres on his blog and quoted The Flock of Seagulls. Of course I clicked IMMEDIATELY since I ate, drank, slept, breathed and lived music during the 80's. There are some odd videos there but there are a LOT of ones that I had forgotten about. What's odd for me is that many of these songs I only knew from the radio or the record store or the clubs and while I have been singing the song all these past 25 years, there is a good chance that I never saw the video. At home we had cable and MTV but once I graduated in 84 I didn't see many videos until after I had moved to Texas and we finally got cable/MTV in 1990.

I recall a summer that we either didn't have cable yet or it was 'out' where the only thing that Joe and I had to watch was the ENTIRE catalogue of Star Trek: The Next Generation on VHS. Not only that but the only VCR we had at the time was an old-style one that my sister in Houston had given to us - it had a CORDED remote that could fast forward while the tape was playing but the audio track was still engaged so the intro to every episode sounded like it was spoken by The Chipmunks instead of Patrick Stewart (I don't remember if Mike H had edited out all of the commercials or not). Patrick Stewart certainly was the hottest old bald guy around in those days! And speaking of Mike H brings us full circle back to the 80's videos since he is the guy who introduced Joe to 'butt-twitcher music' while they were roommates in college which is the ONLY way that Joe is familiar with one of my favorite types of music.

BUT, I didn't see many videos in the mid to late 80's so while the songs are old favorites, the videos are new to me. I don't remember the video for Belouis Some "Imagination" being so nude but I'm glad that I didn't play it in front of the kids. They only watched The Untouchables "Free Yourself", The Jam "That's Entertainment", Big Country "In a Big Country", Altered Images "I Could Be Happy" and Hazy Fantazy "Shiny, Shiny" (a single from an album that I've owned for 27 years and had never seen a video for EVER!)

Billy Idol's "Hot in the City" brings back so many memories of my summer in LA! Yeah, I know that he yells "New York" in the middle but I just ignore that part.

I can't believe that I'm seeing GUYS wear those tight black jeans again and with Converse high tops no less. Don't they realize that those pants make their calves look really skinny which is not at all flattering if they have anything but a negative-sized rear. Tight white pants on baseball players is a good look but THEY have normal-sized calves. (That whole tangent was for Holly!)

While scanning the list of videos I noticed the one for Pebbles "Girlfriend" and I remembered how there were "issues" among us at the record store regarding my hair and how every time that I changed it there would be some new album out where the singer on the cover would have that exact same hair style. Pebbles' curly look was my twin at that time.

My final comment on this era (for now) is that I LOVE how the nicely-dressed men knew how to use product on their hair.

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