1990s

Let’s Dance in Style, Let’s Dance for a While

I guess that if you were going to comb through the annals of pop hits that have made their ways into senior proms and yearbooks, you wouldn’t expect to find lyrics about being resilient in the face of Armageddon.  No, your regular prom fare is about being the best of friends to the end or holding onto that girl or guy and never letting go.  Sometimes the song is written specifically to be used at a prom or graduation (I’m looking at you, Vitamin C) but “Are you gonna drop the bomb or not?” A lyric like that is unexpected.  Unless, that is, you went to high school on Long Island in the 1980s or 1990s, as my class—the Sayville High School Class of 1995—was one of many who dialed up Alphaville’s “Forever Young” for a slow dance at prom.

Running about 3:45 and coming from the 1984 album of the same name, the song was written by Marian Gold, Bernhard Lloyd and Frank Mertens, who comprised the German synth-pop band (whose original name was actually Forever Young).  Coming out at the height of Duran Duran’s MTV reign and around the same time as U2’s The Unforgettable Fire, “Forever Young” seems like it was an album that got lost in a sea of new wave songs that were ruling the playlists of stations like WLIR (later WDRE) in the early to mid-1980s.  However, though the title track only hit 65 on the Billboard Hot 100, stuck around, becoming a cult hit well into the later part of the decade, nearly three years after its release.  According an article in the June 11, 1988 issue of Billboard (whose text is included in the liner notes to the Singles Collection CD), the song was voted as #1 on a countdown by listeners of WDRE in 1988, and had a definite influence across the Island:

“Forever Young” is so slow and dreamy that Laura Branigan could cover it (and did).  While “Forever” was the top record of 1985 at WPST Trenton, NJ, where it is still played as an oldie, it hasn’t been passed from one hip, top 40 PD to another (Both “Blue Monday” and “I Melt With You” have).  It’s not even played everywhere in its own format.  It has shown up at various Long Island high schools as a class song in recent years.  The song’s popularity among teens may be due to its emphasis on mortality, a running theme in the bopper hits of the ‘70s.

WDRE, the name during the late 1980s and early 1990s of what was once WLIR, a leading modern-rock station based on Long Island.

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A little Hootie never hurt …

Arguably the biggest album of 1995, "Cracked Rear View" sold 13 million copies.

A few years ago, the school I was teaching at did “decades day” as one of their spirit week days.  Quite a number of my fellow teachers were around my age, so I was not the only person who wore “’90s attire”.  However, most of those colleges of mine were ex-jocks who somehow managed to squeeze themselves back into old varsity jackets.  Having never played a sport in high school I didn’t have a varsity jacket, so I kind of “grunged” it up with a flannel shirt, some jeans, a Nine Inch Nails T-shirt and a pair of black Doc Martens.

Of course, while the flannel and the NIN T-shirt were authentic, they really didn’t represent who I was or what I wore in high school (in fact, I didn’t get a pair of Docs until after college).  The flannel was from J.Crew (and is now the smock  my son uses for art time in daycare) and while I do have most of Trent Reznor’s recordings from Pretty Hate Machine through The Downward Spiral, I was never a hardcore fan.  But a pair of antique-washed jeans with a braided belt, white oxford shirt, and plaid tie, all from The Gap, would have been lost on my students. 

And truth be told, if I wanted to fully represent my 1990s self, I probably should have worn one of my Hootie and the Blowfish tour T-shirts.

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Once More to the Twine Ball

The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota, which is the subject of an epic “Weird Al” Yankovic song.

For years, I have identified with E.B. White in “Once More to the Lake” as he takes his son to a lake in Maine where he and his father used to vacation when he was a boy.  He expects that in the thirty years or so since he first visited that lake–a time in which American had fallen fully in love with the automobile, among other more “modern” conveniences–much of it will have changed and the visit will be a disappointment.  To his surprise, though some of modern American life has crept in, the lake is mostly the same to the point where he sees himself in his son and his father in himself.  It’s an essay version of Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s Cradle” (though written thirty years prior) and the sort of tale that you probably would aspire to associate with your life.

Alas, I can’t lie anymore and say that when I think of Kezar Lake in New Hampshire, where my parents still spend two weeks every July, I think of E.B. White.  Because the truth is, I think of Weird Al.

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Mecha, Minmei, and a decade-long fight for the future

While I have extensive experience with superhero comic books, my experience with manga is relatively small.  I know that my local Barnes & Noble has a significant amount of shelf space devoted to manga, and that quite a number of my students are often seen walking around with Tokyopop trade paperbacks.  I once flirted with anime a little bit, but going so far as to dive head-first into that particular world of fandom was never something I even attempted.

That being said, I am sure that I’m not alone in my generation by mentioning that as a kid I had exposure to Japanese comics and cartoons through Voltron and Robotech.  I suppose I’ll get around to talking about Voltron some other time, but Robotech seemed to have far greater reach, at least in terms of manga/anime as a whole.  Of course, I think that “true” fans of the genre and the work refer to it (or at least part of it) as Macross, but considering I have spent my life being nothing but mainstream, I’ll just go with Robotech.

My first exposure to Robotech was when  the animated series ran on WPIX 11 every afternoon when I was in elementary school.  It was an enormous show that had more episodes and storylines than I could count, but to be quite honest I wasn’t interested in the plots or character development when I was eight years old.  I just thought it was awesome because the character flew around in planes that transformed into robots that looked exactly like the Autobot named Jetfire (or was it Skyfire?  There was an enormous debate between my friend Evan and myself about this when I was a kid.  Evan, at one point, even claimed that there were two separate toys and he had the other one … but never produced it).  There was a comic book series put out by Comico that retold the television series verbatim (it even had a little “As seen on TV!” box in the middle), which you can probably pick up in a dollar bin somewhere; and a toy line put out by Matchbox which was compatible with G.I. Joe (I had the motorcycle).

However, Robotech was for the most part forgotten after it went off TV and toys were relegated to that “aisle of random and forgotten toys” in Toys R Us.  None of my friends ever really got that into it and so I was kind of alone in my love of the mecha series and gave it up to concentrate on the Joes, movies like Aliens, and baseball. 

Then, when I was in the ninth or tenth grade, a new store called Bassett Book Club opened up next to K-Mart on Sunrise Highway.  The place was huge, several times bigger than the B.Dalton and Waldenbooks I used to frequent at the mall, and the first time my mom took me there, I went straight for the science fiction section to check out their selection of graphic novels and Star Trek books.  After marveling at the fact that the store had the novelization of just about every movie as well as books that I’d only seen listed in my Star Trek Fan Club magazine, the spine of several books with “Robotech” written on the side caught my eye.

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And you say … “Stay” ….

When I started this blog about a month ago, I expected to delve into those things in popular culture that I inexplicably like; however, I didn’t expect to get personal this quickly.

Lisa Loeb & Nine Stories’ “Stay (I Missed You)” came out in the summer of 1994 on the soundtrack to Reality Bites (a film that is my go-to film for any day which I have off from work and nothing to do — “Stay” plays over the closing credits) and hit #1 for a few weeks in August, when both the song and the video, which features Loeb walking around an empty apartment while emoting the lyrics, were more or less inescapable.

This wasn’t a song I was supposed to admit to liking.  I had spent the majority of my high school career trying to fit in with my friends’ love of heavy metal–in fact, at least a few of my friends from high school are still hard core Metallica fans.  I owned just about every Metallica album up to that point, plus had B-sides and rarities on mix tapes made from imports that my friend Brendan had spent an inordinate amount of money on at Middle Earth Records in the Oakdale shopping center.

Needless to say, rolling up at anyone’s house with this song on my Walkman would have been a huge mistake, kind of like the time I left a Righteous Brothers cassette in and someone grabbed my Walkman out of my book bag, listened to it for a moment, and gave me a look that said, “What the fuck is this?”  But I’ve always had a love of music that wasn’t total aggro and didn’t threaten to blow out my eardrums with every single distortion guitar chord.

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Don’t wake me up if I’m dreamin’

The original lineup: Matt, Tiffani, Sly, Jenny, and Tony

You know, I was all set to write about something else (specifically, Commando) when of all people, Jimmy Fallon completely knocked me on my ass.  More specifically, he inspired me … and while you probably don’t know much about me, I will tell you that I am not easily inspired.

Last week, Jimmy Fallon reuinted the cast of California Dreams.

I cannot express how awesome this made me feel when I was surfing around the internet last night and came across the reunion video.  Watching it, I get that there’s a huge joke going on here — Fallon is definitely doing this for the silliness of it all (oh, and because he couldn’t reunite the cast of Saved By The Bell) and when they are performing the cast has a “Man, this was so lame” look on their faces.

And yeah, when it was first on television back in the early 1990s, it was kind of lame.  Airing on Saturdays in the late morning (around noon or so, I think) after SBTB, California Dreams was the story of a group of teenagers that had a rock band.  In fact, the show was created by Peter Engel, the same guy responsible for SBTB, who probably saw an opportunity after the show became popular and aired that Zack Attack episode.

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