Mr. Mister....eighties redux.

Broken Wings. You can hear the base line....bum, bum, bum-ba bum...then the synthesized keyboard, wait for it....the electric guitar playing three chords. It's not music, but it takes my broken brain and sends me back to a time where music decided to throw in the proverbial towel and get silly. Really silly.

If music in the 80's were a tween at the first co-ed dance, it ran from the wall in Anthony-Michael Hall fashion, stripped off the polo-flipped-collar which reveled it's "Tiffany" t-shirt underneath and started whipping around in perfect minimalist melodramatic movement. It decided that being cool didn't matter. That excess and cheesiness was being explored and celebrated in all facets of music and it made more sense than this analogy to just go with it.

Here we are approaching the end of 2007 and everywhere you look the 80's are back in aces. It's in the puffed sleeve variation of blouses. (thank god shoulder pads didn't make the Milan runways!) I know for a fact that I swore I would never wear leggings again. My consession is that I wont wear the stirrups. But I saw those in a boutique...Men are wearing tapered black denim jeans, and every cool bar you go to has some strange remix of an old one-hit wonder 80's tune. I actually heard a high-schooler say: "we are totally into that stuff from back in the eighties". Back?

I am rediscovering music that changes my physiology. I first noticed it when I was drawn to musicians that sang in falsetto, a lot. Josh Rouse, Josh Kelly, even Maroon 5 starting doing it, and then I realized, they are tapping into what made some of the best music from 1987 the best. Who can not want to air-hump a 4-foot speaker to New Order's "Blue Monday"? I'm dead serious. Try NOT jerking your body around and looking for the nearest thing to palm both hands with and pelvic thrust to that song.....Who can dismiss such frivolously serious lyrics as those in Crowded House's "Don't dream its over" ( Catch a devil with a paper cup/Towing my car...hole in the room?) Get serious! Hey now, what the shite are you saying? But it works...It's the eighties. Nothing made sense. I love that.

Look, I could judge it, or I could just say: "I am so on this rad band-wagon. It's the most!" It brings me back to a time where I was still wide-eyed and eager to impress. Where I would spend 3/4 of my morning curling my bangs and feathering. I didn't care about aerosol cans, cause no one did. MTV played Phil Collins and music all the time. The War wasn't on Terror it was on Drugs, I dreamt only of my next boyfriend to hold my hand neatly wrapped in rubber bracelets, A swatch-pop watch and string-friendship bands or winning the speed skate at the roller rink. If I can find that type of purity in some fiendishly fun music in a time where everyone is serious, and anxious and waiting for the world to change....( couldn't help myself) then so be it.

When Frankie says relax. I listen.