In 1989, Cameron Crowe wrote and directed one of the seminal movies of the teen film genre. Starring John Cusack, Ione Skye, and John Mahoney, it’s Say Anything …, one of my favorite movies of all time.
Join me as I take a look back at the movie, talk about my favorite scenes and also take a look at the soundtrack.
You can listen here:
Pop Culture Affidavit podcast page
Hey everyone, take advantage of this special offer where you will get a ton of CDs for JUST ONE PENNY!
Does that sound familiar? If it does, then you’re familiar with Columbia House, the record, tape, CD, and video club that flourished in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s and provided mail-order entertainment for America, one person at a time (or at least that’s what the commercial says).
So, this time around, I not only take a look at Columbia House but at my personal experience with Columbia House, as I got my very first CD player when I was sixteen years old (twenty years ago!) and also signed up, eventually starting my music collection with thirteen CDs.
I had very different tastes in music back then.
You can listen here:
Pop Culture Affidavit podcast page
The following is a list of albums and songs mentioned in the podcast in case you’re interested in actually checking out the music (and if you are interested in purchasing some, use the Amazon link at Two True Freaks) …
Hey everyone, it’s time for THE APOCALYPSE!!! And while you’re sitting around wondering if a civilization that’s been dead for the better part of half of a millennium was right about the world ending, I thought I’d supply you with some music.
You can listen to the entire episode, which is basically one big playlist, here:
Pop Culture Affidavit podcast page
Below is a list of songs with videos provided where available …
Intro music: Great Big Sea, “End of the World” (Live)
1. MC5, “Kick Out the Jams”
2. Andrew W.K., “Ready to Die”
3. Billy Joel, “Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway)” (Live)
4. Nena, “99 Luftballons”
In the third episode of Pop Culture Affidavit, I take a look at “November Rain,” a song from Guns n’ Roses’ 1991 album Use Your Illusion I that was released as a single and had an award-winning video that dominated MTV’s heavy rotation in 1992.
Along with talking about the song, I do a commentary for the music video and actually play it on my keyboard (although to be honest, I play it pretty badly). You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll want to wear Slash’s hat.
You can listen here:
Pop Culture Affidavit podcast page
To supplement the episode, here are a few things that I talked about on the podcast.
First, the ever-famous music video (note: you’ll probably have to watch an ad before you play the video so adjust your commentary track accordingly — and start playing the video about a second after I say “play.” Listening back, I realized that I was off a little. It’s my first commentary, go easy on me.):
Next, here’s a link to the short story “Without You” by Del James, upon which the video was based: “Without You”
The watershed moments in your life rarely come with a script. Oh sure, you have your major milestones and accomplishments but the moments of true epiphany are the most random, often happening when you least expect it. One such moment in my life came before a club meeting during my senior year of high school. I was helping pass out agendas and had left my backpack on my seat. A friend of mine, Jim, was a fellow officer in the club happened to see my Walkman and out of curiosity, pulled it out of my bag and gave it a listen. I returned to the table in time to see a look of complete confusion make its way across his face.
“Give me that,” I said, snatching the Walkman out of his hand. Jim didn’t respond, and I put my headphones on to hear what had prompted such a strange look. Playing near full blast was “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.”
Luckily, the meeting soon began and Jim didn’t care enough to mention it again or to anyone else, and needless to say that had me relieved because while I brushed the incident off, I felt the same sort of weird guilt you’d feel as if you’d been caught masturbating. This was music I had been listening to when nobody was around, an act of musical self-pleasure that I kept hidden from the guys I talked heavy metal with at the lunch table where for all they knew, I was genuinely impressed that Jeff tracked down a Megadeth bootleg or that Brian finally acquired the studio version of “Breadfan” when he bought the Japanese import single for “One.” Had he mentioned it to the group of people we hung out with, I would have been mercilessly ridiculed, like the time they found my copy of Born in the U.S.A. and wrote “Nice ass!” on the cover.
I probably shouldn’t have cared, to be honest. What’s wrong with having your own tastes? Who cares what other people think, right? But I was an individual with serious self-esteem problems and a need for approval that meant not only did I really want to seem like I was cool, but I was quite possibly the easiest target for ridicule. I will spare you the vulgar nicknames, the perfume sprayings, and other jokes in my honor and say that though Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield’s glory years were a good thirty years behind them at that point, my listening to the Righteous Brothers tape I’d borrowed from my mother, especially “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin'” had a perfectly reasonable explanation: Top Gun. (more…)
And this is only A-H of my CD collection.
One of the most practical gifts I received for Christmas was a CD book the size of a photo album. It’s made out of faux leather and holds about 375 CDs, which is about half of my music collection. I’m going to need another one at some point, but I was able to clean out half of the dresser that houses my CDs and I did something that I have never been able to do in nearly twenty years of owning compact discs: I threw away my jewel cases.
That sounds completely ridiculous because I am sure that there are plenty of people who were throwing jewel cases out the moment they bought their CDs a decade ago and didn’t feel the need to write about it. Then again, I have that hoarder’s mentality where I hold on to some things because I feel like I am going to miss out on something, which is why I never threw out my jewel cases the first time I had one of these large CD books fourteen years ago, or during my twenties when I hauled box after box of CDs up and down flights of stairs during move after move.
So why pull the trigger now? Well, as I was making my Christmas list, I realized that I had absolutely no CDs on it. I certainly had been listening to a lot of music, but I couldn’t remember the last time I had purchased a new CD (which, after some thinking, I realized was The Gaslight Anthem’s American Slang), and the dresser where I keep the CDs was taking up so much space in my office that I wanted to get rid of it. I began with the start of the alphabet, or ABBA Gold, and in a few hours found myself staring at a pile of empty jewel cases on the floor.
It didn’t seem right that they—along with the CD booklets—were so disposable. If this were a record collection, I would have been carefully preserving the album sleeves and covers as much as the albums themselves. But so many of the jewel cases were cracked and missing pieces that preservation wasn’t exactly going to be an issue. And I don’t think that years from now, a guy on Antiques Roadshow will be telling me that my copy of Ride the Lightning would be worth more if the jewel case didn’t have a crack in it. (more…)
When I was younger, I lived for year-in-review specials; heck, I still really enjoy anything with a good retrospective attached to it. But as December 31 drew closer, I always found myself getting psyched for two things: being able to stay up past midnight, and watching whatever special was on that looked back. Even if it was a badly produced local news special, I would look for it in TV Guide and if I wasn’t going to be home to watch it, I’d pop a tape in the VCR and set the timer.
Unfortunately, throughout those years my year-in-review options were limited by my not having access to cable, so I missed what the kids in my generation considered the definitive retrospecticus, which was MTV’s Year in Rock. I don’t think that the channel does this anymore, but I’d say that up until maybe the late 1990s or early 2000s (when TRL had basically taken everything over), the news department was pretty steady with its programming, bringing news every hour (set to the bass of Megadeth’s “Peace Sells”), and The Week in Rock every single Friday. So the Year in Rock made total sense.
I am sure that I saw at least one of these Year in Rock specials at one time or another, because my sister and I would often spend New Year’s Eve at my grandmother’s house and would go to bed shortly after midnight. Some years, we stayed up listening to 106.1 WBLI play their “Top 106 Songs of the Year” coundown; others were spent watching a hockey game or reading books. But as I went through my rather disastrous first few years as a teenager and my sister inched closer to adolescence, the two of us would sit in the back room with MTV playing, watching whatever was on it (or sometimes flipping to VH-1) because we were fully ensconced in trench warfare with my father over whether or not we would ever get cable, and at the time were taking heavier losses than at the Battle of the Somme, so we took our cable where we could get it.
Anyway, YouTube being the beautiful thing that it is, someone took the time to put the 1991 Year in Rock special up in seven parts and since it was twenty years ago–a huge year for music as well as the year I finally escaped junior high and headed to high school–I thought I’d take a look at it for my last entry of the year. Usually, I’d spin a few paragraphs here about the various things in it and provide a link or two, but I felt like doing a bit of commentary because the entire special is available for viewing. It may be unethical in a way and I am essentially piggybacking off of someone else’s upload … so H/T to YouTube user 1BigBucks1, whoever you are.
Okay, let’s get started. (more…)
My car is quite possibly the most annoying place to be during the month of December. That’s because I listen to Christmas music almost non-stop. I have an entire CD wallet full of CDs that I bust out between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and a preset on Sirius for holiday music. Now, this may seem like a far way to go to listen to the sounds of the season, especially when there is a regular radio station that plays non-stop Christmas music, but the station near me plays a pretty bad selection. Everything on Z-95.1 is too inspirational or the same bad Sinatra (or Sinatra impersonator’s) rendition of an otherwise okay song.
Especially missing is the humor. Oh sure, they’ll play “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer” and some stay-at-home mom with the fashion sense of an elementary school art teacher will call in a request for “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas,” but those songs aren’t very good and even if I did like them, it’s not worth listening to Dan Fogelberg to get to them.
When I was younger, the local deejays would run the occasional Christmas song and not a 24-7 holiday barrage that we have now, and while they played their fair share of traditional Christmas tunes, some of the rock stations (I was particularly attached to WBAB, the classic rock station that was one of the very few my radio actually picked up) would find the time to play something out of the ordinary. WBAB is the reason I’m so familiar with The Kinks’ “Father Christmas” and The Waitresses’ “Christmas Wrapping,” but it’s also the reason I am familiar with Bob Rivers’ Twisted Christmas tunes and other warped material.
So, if you are being forced to suffer through little brats singing about hippos, the Trans-Siberian Orchestra playing the caroling of bells as if it has explosions, or versions of “Do You Hear What I Hear” that are so epic you expect to hear Gandalf shout “You shall not pass!”, may I present five songs that will provide some relief. (more…)
[A quick note: this is actually something that I posted on an old blog of mine about four years ago; I decided to repost it here because while I was getting a post ready on Christmas songs, I remembered this and thought it was worth the repost. I’ll have another, all-new post before the weekend.]
So I’m driving to the most depressing Food Lion on the face of the earth and I have Z 95.1, our local “Lite Rock” station on because they’re the greater Charlottesville area’s source for “All Christmas, All the Time” every holiday season and I hear that song about drinking a toast to innocence. Turns out it’s “Same Old Lang Syne” by soft rock god Dan Folgelberg. I don’t know why it’s on the holiday playlist but someone out there likes it.
Anyway, it’s been going through my head and while this particular commentary had me laughing my ass off, I still couldn’t help but look up the lyrics to break them down. And analyze them. Because it’s what I do best, right?
Same Old Lang Syne
Okay, so by looking at the title, I can see where this might fit into the holidays because “Old Lang Syne” is the song sung at New Year’s, and the phrase, according to Wikipedia, means … literally as “old long since”, or “long long ago” or “days gone by”. So perhaps there is some theme of reminiscing of days gone by or remembering things from long ago, which is what you tend to get from your average soft rock song.
Met my old lover in the grocery store
The snow was falling Christmas Eve
I stole behind her in the frozen foods and I touched her on the sleeve
She didn’t recognize the face at first but then her eyes flew open wide
She went to hug me and she spilled her purse
And we laughed until we cried
So we start out in a grocery store. The guy’s shopping for some peas or something like that, which is pretty interesting considering that the guy in the song is supposed to be Fogelberg himself and at he was a pretty successful musician in his day. But people have to eat, so maybe he was standing in Waldbaum’s in his leisure suit with a wide-collared shirt, gold chains and classic soft rock beard looking over a shopping list going, “Okay, got the chicken and the Potato Buds. They were out of cheddar, so I got swiss cheese. Shit, I forgot the paper towels. Oh well, I’ll get them on my way toward the register.”
He’s doing his shopping and he sees and old flame. But not just any old flame. A LOVER. You’ve gotta emphasize the word LOVER because it is quite possibly one of the dumbest words ever. There are only two ways I can accept the use of the word LOVER. The first is if you’re talking about someone you are screwing around on your wife with. That’s technically a LOVER. The second is if you’re Will Ferrell and Rachel Dratch in that SNL sketch where they play that creepy couple who says “My Lover” a lot. (more…)
I just started participating in a Facebook “challenge” (meme?) called the “30 Day Song Challenge.” For the next month, I have to post one song per day to my wall and each day has a different caveat. For instance, Day One was “Your Favorite Song” (for the record: “Summer, Highland Falls” by Billy Joel) and Day Twenty-Seven is “Song You Wish You Could Play on an Instrument” (I have yet to share this one). I got bored one night and wrote a list down in a notebook, although I’m sure those songs will change somewhat when I go to post them. Day Seven’s song is “Song That Reminds You of an Event.” Now, I would have used my wedding song but that is already being used for Day Twenty-Three, “Song For Your Wedding,” so I wound up being stuck trying to think about something else. Strangely enough, the first song that popped into my head was “I’ll Be There For You” by The Rembrandts.
If you are unfamiliar with the song’s title, you’ll know exactly what I mean when I say, it’s the theme from Friends. Friends premiered in the fall of 1994, back when NBC’s Must See TV lineup consisted of Mad About You at 8:00, Seinfeld at 9:00, and ER at 10:00. Friends took the 8:30 slot and a very short-lived and largely forgotten Dabney Coleman sitcom called Madman of the People premiered at 9:30. The night for NBC was a powerhouse because CBS was premiering Due South and Chicago Hope and ABC had Matlock along with the culturally significant but ratings anemic My So-Called Life. But the time winter and spring rolled around, Friends was the breakout hit and everything that had been new and in direct competition was basically scorched earth (I love MSCL but even the most ardent of fans will admit that Angela Chase and company got their asses handed to them). Friends was one of the few Generation X-oriented shows/films that actually connected, so much so that by the time Ross got off of a plane at Kennedy Airport with Julie on his arm while Rachel waited unknowingly with flowers and new feelings, you couldn’t escape the show. There were posters, T-shirts, magazines covers, a hairstyle, and that theme song.
It’s somehow ironic that “I’ll Be There For You” because so popular because at the previous fall’s Emmy Awards, Jason Alexander had done a song and dance number about TV theme songs because they were considered to be a dying breed, and kind of still are. After all, the last TV theme song written specifically for television that charted I think was this very song. In fact, I think this took most people by surprise because by the spring of 1995 when Friends-mania began gaining serious traction, the entire version of the song had yet to be released or even recorded. The Rembrandts had recorded a one-minute TV version of “I’ll Be There For You” for the show’s opening credits and wound up rushing the full three-minute version of the song onto their album because there was serious demand by people for its radio airplay.
I was still listening to WBAB in the evenings while I did homework and the station had been receiving requests for the song. Now, radio stations weren’t going to just play a one-minute television theme song, so some deejay decided to just loop it three times to create a three-minute song (according to Wikipedia, said deejay was in Nashville). WBAB began playing this as a way to placate the listeners, even though I’m sure there were plenty of real rock and roll fans who wound up being disgusted. As I sat in my bedroom doing my homework that May, I managed to catch a playing of the song and hit record on my stereo (having a tape in the cassette deck ready to record stuff was still a common practice of mine at the time). Then I played it over and over and over, to the point where I nearly wore the tape out. This, of course, was in the days before I would go and find out via the Internet who sang the song and could download it for about a buck, so I had to wait for the opportunity to take a weekend trip to the mall to see if it was on CD.
Pop Culture Affidavit 