I stole this song off of John Scalzi’s post from earlier this week.
I’d never heard of Burning Sensations or their MTV hit, “Burning of the Whale”. I listened to it and was intrigued. It appears to be about a guy living in a whale, and the production is a bite out of the eighties, just in a slightly different direction. I figure it’s a good theme song because it’s an artistic attempt, and it’s different, and they tried, and these things are what art is about, no matter which venue we pursue. Have a dream, apply some imagination and work, and put it out there.
This photo on Facebook reminded a friend and I of a conversation we once had about the songs, “Our House”. One version is by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Madness did the other. We just chatted about how different these songs were as we went about something else.
I haven’t seen him since around 2003 but I remember him fondly. FB connects us, so sometimes FB works as designed.
I have friends who love this song, “The Safety Dance” (1982). It is quite catchy, and troubling for me, once it’s in my ear, it’s hard to dislodge. Those lyrics —
We can dance if we want to
We can leave your friends behind
‘Cause your friends don’t dance and if they don’t dance
Well, they’re no friends of mine
Say, we can go where we want to
A place where they will never find
And we can act like we come from out of this world
Leave the real one far behind
The words are easy to exploit to use for other purposes. For example, I have sung to my cats, “You can eat if you want to, or you can leave your food behind. But if you don’t eat, you won’t get a treat, and it’s your fault, not mine.”
Continuing a newly established trend of using my walking to inspire my theme music instead of my dreams and pets, this song popped into my head today.
I’m not an amazing walker, but I usually manage to walk seven to ten miles a day, typically in three or four segments. I like walking as part of my writing rituals. But once I’m done writing in my head, my thoughts wander. Sometimes, inspired by the writing or editing process, a song pops in.
So it was today. Finishing with my phantom writing/editing and feeling happy, I told my muses and myself, “That’s it. We got it.” That prompted the drumming intro to the popular hit by The Go-Go’s (a spelling which maddens me, as I think that it should be The Go-Gos, but whatever), “We Got the Beat” (1982).
Just yesterday, I was walking along, thinking, here I go again, naturally downloading the White Snake song, “Here I Go Again” (1982).
Although I respected Coverdale’s skills and talents, except for Deep I never became a great fan of him. I tried. I had White Snake albums and Coverdale-Page (where I thought Coverdale often sounded like Plant, with the overall result that C-P sounded like Led Zeppelin), but I thought there was too much glam-rock to Coverdale after DP. I thought the glam-rock sub-genre was often derivative, simplistic, and repetitive.
That doesn’t stop me from thinking of this song when I take a deep breath and tell myself, here I go again.
I was streaming “Eye of the Tiger” (Survivor, 1982) in my head as I was cleaning the carpets today.
“Eye of the Tiger” is one of those songs that was released and gained popularity while my wife and I lived outside of America working for Uncle Sam. In this case, we were at Kadena AB, Okinawa, Japan. I was mostly working twelve-hour shifts in the 603rd MASS Command Post. Between those shifts and typhoons, it seems like we didn’t hear much from the outside world. When we visited Hawaii on leave, we discovered that McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets were the next greatest thing, MTV had launched and was gaining popularity, and Rocky III was the hot movie, with “Eye of the Tiger” as the movie’s defining song.
I worked with an officer while stationed at Shaw AFB, SC. He was a navigator who graduated college with a degree in Literature, and he wrote poetry on the side.
Music of the era set him off. He thought the lyrics were shallow and the liberties taken with grammar annoyed him. People used to sing in full, coherent sentences, telling a story, he would say, and the songs were often very poetic. He was my age, and it amused me that this upset him, because that’s not what popular music is about. It’s a reflection of the times and how language is used. It’s dynamic. Those were exactly some of the things that he mourned as going wrong.
I remember once we were getting ready to deploy to Egypt. Killing time as we had to do in those situations, we talked music, and he singled out this song, which had been released a few years before, as one that he particularly disliked – his exact words. His diatribe made me laugh.
Here is Eddy Grant with “Electric Avenue” from 1982.
While driving today, I heard the end of a song, “Don’t You Want Me”, by The Human League. When the song ended, Casey Kasem came on and told us that was the number song in America, according to Billboard, for the week of July 10, 1982.
The station went on to mention that it had been a digitally remastered recording of the recording that was made in 1982. All this fired multiple memories: July, 1982. Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, Japan. American Top 40 was played every Saturday. Broken neck with my head immobilized in a halo device. Hot and humid summer. A wonderful cat named Jade we inherited from another family, and another, a sweet little Bombay Black named Crystal, also a gift from another family.
I’d broken my neck on the previous Memorial Day weekend. I was freed from the halo after three months. Crystal died in 1995, taken by cancer. Jade passed away when we lived in California twenty years after she started living with us. She earned the nickname Pokey because she liked to dawdle, but she was a damn smart feline, definitely the smartest cat we have ever known. She was infinitely smarter than the four who live with us now. Casey Kasem died in 2014. The Human League still rocks on.
I’d settled in to read and watch television. I wanted to read, but I was tired, so I had the television on. The book, Lincoln in the Bardo, is an interesting and easy read.
Naturally two cats were staking me out, awaiting me to settle so they could leap up onto my lap and read with me. After they established territory and settled, one announced they were going to refund some cat food (and probably fur) with ominous upchucking sounds. Responding with swift panic, I shooed the little feline off my lap and sought something to put under him to catch his discharge. Once all the drama was over, I told him, “You almost dropped a bomb on me, buddy.”
That triggered memories of The Gap Band and their 1982 technofunk offering, “You Dropped A Bomb On Me”.
Michael Seidel, writer 