We Got the Beat – Teen Beat and Tiger Beat Magazines
I’ve always been big on magazines. I love lip gloss magazines like Glamour and Cosmo, magazines with photos of beautiful food I will never make or eat like Gourmet and Food & Wine, and magazines that keep me up to date on all the important news of the day like US Weekly or In Touch (don’t judge: they pass the time nicely while getting my hair done.) As a teenager, I loved my Sassy and Seventeen magazines, of course. But as a...
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...
K-tel Records
Ask me what some of my favorite albums are and you’ll get a short list of ones that I would make it to the desert island with me – Tattoo You by The Rolling Stones, Beauty and the Beat by The Go-Go’s, Kings of the Wild Frontier by Adam and the Ants. I know these records up and down, and I never get tired of them. But ask me about important records, ones that take me back to a time and a place, ones where when I see the cover of them a...
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...
Sam Draws the 80s and It’s Totally Awesome
You may have seen Sam’s drawings online; he’s developed quite a following. In fact, he’s been featured in the Huffington Post, Good Morning America and has received praise from the likes of George Takei, Martha Quinn, and the guys from Wang Chung. If you are new to Sam’s work, he is a 6 year old artist in Portland, Oregon. After hearing a steady stream of 80s music (thanks to his 80s-loving mom), he was moved...
80s Power Ballads: A Rating System
AUTHOR’S NOTE: “How did I forget ‘Home Sweet Home’?” That’s what I’ve been asking myself ever since I read the feedback to my last post, the one about the greatest songs from 1985. Sure, I couldn’t mention every big song. But, next to Dead or Alive’s “You Spin Me Round,” Motley Crue’s signature love song was probably the most glaring omission. Of all the songs to overlook, how did I miss THAT one? (Actually, I think I know how:...
1985: Thirty Year Retrospective (Music Edition)
Bowling for Soup sure picked the right year to celebrate in its song “1985.” Now, I know that I once proclaimed, on this very site, that 1983 was the best year in music ever. And last fall, Rolling Stone magazine called 1984 “pop’s greatest year.” But 1985’s got some game as well. So why, thirty years on, are we still preoccupied with 1985? Well, 1985 was the year of… Defining the Decade: Quintessential 80s tracks were released...
In Defense of Band-Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”
In 1984, an instantly classic holiday song tried to save the world. Thirty years later, it seems the song needs to be saved from itself. I originally intended to write a piece outlining how the 1984 version of Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” is infinitely superior to the 2014 version. (Sorry, One Direction guys, but it’s true.) But after some initial research, I realized the 1984 version is not quite as beloved as I...
Sampling the 80s
Why Current Artists Can’t Resist Picking from the 80s Buffet As if you need more evidence that 1980s music is the greatest, consider this: even now, almost a quarter-century after the decade folded, artists are still ripping off– oops! I mean, “sampling”– 80s hooks for their own songs. For example, just the other day, I was thrilled to hear on the radio Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner”...
The 5 Best Make-Out Songs of the ‘80s
The 1980s gave us so much great music—totally awesome music for partying, doing aerobics, slow dancing, cruising on Friday nights, and above all, making out! Who else remembers kissing in the backseat of the car or on the couch with one eye open, making sure Mom or Dad didn’t peek out the living room window or come down the stairs? Anyone? Depending on what area of the country you grew up in, making out might also have been called...
80s Halloween-Themed Music Quiz
It is officially the season– when grizzly ghouls from every tomb close in to seal our doom, when we bark at the moon and speak of the devil, when people across the country ponder the eternal question of “Who ya gonna call?” And so, Like Totally 80s would like to present our first-ever “80s-Music-Halloween-Themed-Quiz.” (Still working on the name…) [WpProQuiz...
Trapped in the Columbia House Tape Club
Who remembers flipping through your Young Miss magazine, comic book, or the Sunday paper and coming across this ad? It was the deal of the century! Eleven (or ten, depending on which offer you used) tapes for a penny? And I get a twelfth tape FREE? And I only have to buy a few more tapes at the regular price (plus shipping and handling) over the next year?!? Who needs to read the fine print, I’d be a fool not to join Columbia House!...
