Musical What-Ifs, Back to the Future Style
Before there was the Butterfly Effect, there was the McFly Effect. The Back to the Future trilogy is essentially a dissertation on chaos theory, on the ways that tinkering with the past can affect the future. Plow into one of Mr. Peabody’s trees in 1955? The Twin Pines Mall becomes the Lone Pine Mall in 1985. Interfere with your parents initial meeting? You could be erased from existence. Now, let’s get meta for a moment and consider...
Obscur-Eighties, Vol. 1
It’s simple math. A decade is made up of 520 weeks, right? And for every one of those weeks, Billboard puts out a “Hot 100” list, detailing the top one hundred songs of those seven days. Now, granted, a hundred new songs don’t appear every week. (Just last year, Imagine Dragons’ “Radioactive,” for example, ended a record-breaking eighty-seven weeks on the Hot 100.) Still, if I can get technical here, a LOT of songs cycle through those...
80s Walk-up Songs in Major League Baseball
Like a tarpless field after a sudden May shower, Major League Baseball is awash in statistics. From Earned Run Average to Runs Batted In to On-Base Percentage, it seems every aspect of the game can be boiled down to a number. Well, almost every aspect. Indeed, there is one phenomenon that has thus far eluded even the most moneyballin’ statistician: the Eighties Entrance Music Effect (EEME). Simply put, a player’s EEME attempts to...
80s Songs in Non-80s TV Shows
Last month, the FOX series Glee ended its six-year run. To coincide with the series finale, I envisioned writing a piece about all the 80s songs that appeared on the show. Examples: Artie getting out of his wheelchair for a dream-sequence “Safety Dance”; Finn the Quarterback singing a slowed-down “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”; and the New Directions performing “Don’t Stop Believin’”— along with just about every other Journey...
30 Facts About Don’t You (Forget About Me)
Thirty years ago, a Scottish band– relatively unknown in the U.S.–made a request to the world. And thirty years later, the world is still honoring it. “Don’t You (Forget About Me)”– that’s all Simple Minds asked of us in February 1985, when their signature song from the film The Breakfast Club first debuted. And so far, we haven’t forgotten: the song and the film have been permanently etched into our pop-culture...
