Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Wish I could slay your demons, but now that time has passed

All right, my feelings on the whole Valentine's sham are pretty much summed up in the previous post. If you really love someone you shouldn't need Hallmark dictating when to treat that person to something special. The only good thing about Valentine's Day? The romantic crap that gets dragged out every February to make us feel all warm and fuzzy about ourselves. Like I happened to flip past Much More Retro this morning while I was eating breakfast. They'd dedicated the day to, surprise surprise, love songs. And I was so blown away by the cheesiness that I almost dropped my cereal in my lap. Sure, MMR is cheesy by nature, but 80s love song videos are so wondrously crappy that they should be reveled in as pigs revel in poop.

Case in point, Chicago's "You're the Reason in My Life". The video, which I don't think I'd ever seen before, has what I assume to be Chicago sitting around a room playing the song. This is par for the course as far as 80s videos go (see the earlier post about this "band-plays-song" phenomena). There are four, count 'em four, keyboards going, which is amazing for the sheer over-kill of a bad, bad instrument. Like they're saying "You know this song sucks 'cause there's so much keyboard!" The drummer's doing this complicated high hat thing, but there's no high hat to be heard in the song just the painfully simple bass drum, snare drum, bass drum snare drum. And best of all, the lead singer's droning on about this special woman who's his "inspiration," but THERE'S NO BLOODY WOMAN AROUND. Just these coiffed losers in spandex and neon who may or may not know what they're doing.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

why is everyone so hard on the '80s?

neon colours, slouch socks, breakdancing, big hair...i mean, come on.

Michael said...

I don't think I'm hard on the 80s. They do need tough love, sure; but hard? Never.

Though, now that I think about it, they do need to be punished for the shorts-over-spandex with leg warmers look. Form now on I will be much harder on them. They'll learn.

Anonymous said...

I'll forgive you for talking trash about Chicago. But only this once.

You're on notice.

Michael said...

That's my friend, Jaimie: defending the besmirched honour of Chicago. Somewhere Peter Cetera thanks you.