Yet ANOTHER Top 100 (or so) Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50

#286) "Two Tribes" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood - Frankie... is remembered primarily for "Relax", but this was the song that caught my attention on MTV (or was it Friday Night Videos?) back in the day, which is fitting, because though I love the song, with its heady (in some ways prescient) message and unforgettable bass riff, it's the video that I really took notice of. The two together do the unsettling tail-end-of-the-Cold-War tension I felt as a child of the 1980s justice, and the video - from the moaning CAD siren at the beginning, to the clever pairing of the action to the music, to the brilliantly depicted escalation of tension that culminates with the world's leaders realizing they've lost control of the situation at the very last moment - is still blackly entertaining. Funny and frightening, which is not easy to do.

It has to be the original album version though (the version in the video?), not one of the seemingly innumerable re-mixes that thump their way through clubs to this day.




"Are we living in a land, where sex and horror are the new Gods...?"

#287) "I'm Eighteen" by Alice Cooper - It only scored #482 on Rolling Stone's 2011 "500 Greatest Songs of all Time", and that's both hard to believe, and hard to take. For my money, "I'm Eighteen"  is one of the best rock and roll songs ever recorded. Just rock and roll, that's the key. Not "metal", not "welcome to my nightmare", no need for outrageous stagecraft or black eye liner, but a kind of musical declaration that I think, by way of lyrics, musicality and vocals, more than adequately describes being/turning eighteen. If someone had asked Cooper in 1971 to WRITE a song about the subject, he might never have come up with this. Some things just got to happen on their own.

"Lines form on my face and hands / Lines form from the ups and downs..."