Sunday, November 29, 2009

It’s the ‘80s Fault

Let me start off by saying that I love almost all things '80s. Movies, music, games, and even fashion for the most part. Like most of my friends, I grew into my teens during the '80s and so my life was influenced by the culture of the times.

Do you remember playing Trivial Pursuit till the wee hours? What about listening to the radio for hours in the hopes of hearing your favourite song play without the announcer's voice or a commercial, so that you could tape the song (without having to buy the whole album)? Remember the days before the internet and Cell phones? Did you have a Tandy computer? Intellivision, Atari 2600, Frogger, Pac-Man, Rubix Cube… Ah, the good old days right? For those of us who grew up during those ten years, it seems so.

The other day I was playing some music while we cleaned up the house. My kids love Genesis and a lot of the older music that I grew up with so I was playing some of the hits of the '80s for them. As they asked me what each song title was, I got thinking about mixed tapes. Do you remember the excitement you felt when that special someone made you a mixed tape? They would put songs on it that reminded them of you or had a message in that particular song that they wanted you to pick up on. Or when you made one for someone else? The effort that you put into picking just the right song? Hours spent fast forwarding and rewinding those tapes, in order to get the exact timing between songs. Then carefully printing out the song titles on the label. I get exhausted just thinking about it.

Looking back twenty years on (yes, we are getting old!), this was kind of a strange thing to do. Especially when you look at the titles of some of the songs. Can you imagine if someone from the '80s, time travelled forward to today and had a crush on someone and made a mixed tape (or mixed mp3, or whatever), how strange and disturbing it would be. So in the interests of making my point here is my creepy retrospective mixed tape playlist (and yes, I know 'playlist' is not an '80s term!).

  1. Always On My Mind – Pet Shop Boys
  2. I Want To Know What Love Is – Foreigner
  3. Why Can't This Be Love – Van Halen
  4. Every Breath You Take – The Police
  5. Eye In The Sky – Alan Parson's Project
  6. Lay Your Hands On Me – Thompson Twins
  7. Can't Fight This Feeling – REO Speedwagon
  8. Missing You – John Waite
  9. Hard Habit To Break – Chicago
  10. Follow You, Follow Me – Genesis
  11. Better Be Home Soon – Crowded House
  12. I Just Died In Your Arms – Cutting Crew

Let the stalking begin!

1 comment:

Daniel in the Lion's Den said...

I didn't go through my teens in the 80's but I always wished I did. Pop culture in the 90's drove me nuts, especially all the senseless 80's bashing that was part of it. I can relate to all the stuff your talking about a lot better than people reminicing (did I spell that right?), about Nirvana, yuck!