[Note: pretty much every link on this page is SFW. Go ahead. However, if you play them in your office your co-workers will demand an explanation or (probably correctly) out you as a geezer who pre-dates Seattle Grunge.]
So that backfired!
[For those of you who just tuned in, I Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” recently established an earworm beachhead in my skull. The single word “eclipse” had done it. Everyone knows you can’t kill an earworm but, for reasons which elude modern science, it’ll you can plant it in someone else’s head and run like hell. So I wrote a 1,400 word rant to exorcise it. It worked! I had a blissful earworm free evening. Then things went pear shaped! Follow if you dare.]
It began with a commenter who linked to Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart”.
Guiltily I’ll admit I sorta’ like that song. It’s a guilty pleasure at best. It’s over-orchestrated, overwrought, over produced, and almost a parody of itself. But I liked it when I was young and as the ’97 New Beetle proved, we’re all soft about our youthful influences. So I can live with it.
I hadn’t, however, seen the video. In my youth I listened to it on a “Boom Box” (a technology that held sway until Apple killed it with iNinjas). No screen on a boom box so no bullshit. Just the ability to rattle windows and drain D-Cells by the dozen. Also when I was a kid… we actually played outdoors. Amazing how the past is different.
Was there anything more American, than 65 dials and switches shoved into a deafening wad of batteries and speakers. I love my culture!
The video, on the other hand, is precisely why the 1980’s were shit. It has very large hair and an inexplicable blend of cougar based homo-eroticism, and a boarding school. If you missed it; perhaps you are too young to remember the 1980s, or maybe you spent that decade drunk, or perhaps you spent it hiding in a bunker waiting for the Russkies to vaporize us all… you should watch it. Consider it a cultural foray into why the past wasn’t all good.
I commented on the Bonnie Tyler video experience:
“What. The. Fuck. Is. Going. On. In. That. Video.
Did I just spend five minutes watching a cougar with ’80’s hair having an ecstasy freak out at the young gay men’s athletic club and religious cult boarding school?”
Almost immediately I was presented with the “Literal Translation Version“, which is pure brilliance! (A salute to commenter Phssthpok for 5:33 of concentrated awesome.) You must see it! (Ideally watch it after you see the original. You’ll kill 10 minutes total but what the hell else are you doing right now?)
Meanwhile, my brain dodged Cheeseburgers and Lawyers. Nice try folks but I cannot be swayed by Jimmy Buffet or Warren Zevon. (Zevon’s lyrics remind me that somewhere there are poor bastards that had to raise young members of the Bush and Kennedy clans and they certainly got those sorts of calls.)
Just as the dust settled, Tennessee Budd fired this:
“MacArthur’s Park is melting in the dark
All the sweet green icing flowing down….”
It meant nothing to me. I playfully sent off Strawberry Alarm Clock’s “Incense and Peppermints“, which I like so much I don’t mind when it “earworms” (to coin a verb).
Little did I know that MacArthur Park would hit me like a nuclear bomb!
Folks, this is important. MacArthur Park is the name of that goddamn “Cake in the rain” song. It’s the weaponized smallpox of earworms. If I’d associated MacArthur Park with the brutal, unrelenting, schmatlzy, death blow that is the Cake song… I would not only have refused to click the link… I’d have set my computer on fire.
I’m putting the link below but I’m serious about this… don’t fuck with the Cake Song… it’ll earworm your ass into the stone age. You’ve been warned:
