Still works, once in a while, to jam out to loud music like this, gets me (healthily) aggressive, makes things (and me) feel urgent and vital...perhaps because "(You Shook Me) All Night Long" still holds up, that is, doesn't seem as lamely dated as other metal music from the 1980s. This is probably due to the fact that it was released in 1980, was more hard rock (that is, rock and roll being pushed to the limit) than the spandex, bandana and eye liner-wearing "metal" clown show that arose in the Reagan years, which rendered the whole genre kind of inorganic and unrelatable, and by the end of the decade, naturally left us screaming out loud for something like grunge.
"She was a fast machine, she kept her motor clean / She was the best damn woman that I'd ever seen..."
#319) "Hair of the Dog" by Nazareth - See #318, Paragraph 1.
"Now you're messing with a son of a bitch..."
#320) "Round and Round" by Ratt - And again... Although the video for this song does have undeniable elements of the mascara and spandex decadence that defined the scene in the 1980s (and completely put me off), at the same time, it's a pretty solid song. And I notice that among the "oldie" music I play at work (which at this point, includes stuff from the 1990s...even early 2000s), "Round and Round" is usually on the short list of songs Millennials and younger either already know and like, or eventually come to like if they hear it enough.
And come on, how can you not love Milton Berle in the video?
"I knew right from the beginning, that you would end up winning..."
#320) "It's Tricky" by Run-DMC - Question: would the admittedly awkward spectacle of me and two other kids from my middle school years "breakdancing" in our front yards to "It's Tricky", blasting it and others from the golden age of rap on boxes that didn't really sport a lot of boom, be considered cultural appropriation?
Mind you, we weren't just listening to it, we felt we were living it, which by every possible measure could not have been less possible. But young and dumb and eager to feel way more cool than we were, way more "street" than we could ever be, we cobbled together whatever gear and clothing we thought might help us pass - a Sony dual cassette boom box (again, not a lot boom), Adidas or parachute pants, Converse sneakers...(I think I may have thought a beret and a Swatch watch was a good idea too)... - and totally went to town in the summer of 1980-something, gesticulating spastically across the lawn, feeling edgy and defiant and raw. We were white kids who wanted to be black, because the music, the style, the look, was totally cool, totally the opposite of everything we knew, opposite of the town we grew up in, and I can cite those experiences - short lived though they were - as having shaped, in some measure at least, the adult I would one day be.
If that's cultural appropriation, and cultural appropriation is wrong, then lock me up. I wouldn't trade those memories for anything. You bet your ass I appropriated, happily and excitedly merging a variety of elements more laughably disjointed than I realized into a completely artificial (but no less gratifying) "street cred". And no joke, as it was happening, there ceased being skin color and cultural divides lending at worst aversion, at best an inability to communicate; there was just the music, and I was part of it in my northern hinterlands hometown, where there was probably a grand total of five black people growing up. And yet there I was, getting a mouthful of grass trying to do the Worm, feeling crazy cool wind-milling around the sidewalk (after a fresh push-off from my buddies).
Mortifying, kind of...but isn't that what's supposed to happen? Isn't that what happened when Run-DMC covered Aerosmith's "Walk this Way" and Aerosmith was in on it? Didn't everyone get on board, remove the laces from their shoes, and just start grooving?
When it comes to race relations in this country, it seems we've lost ground, rather than gained it. That isn't the way the last 40 years were supposed to play out.
"I met this little girlie, her hair was kinda curly..."
