So, in the spirit of harmless High Fidelity fun:

stc wrote:

“I’ve seen a ton of hair metal T-Shirts in the last year or so (Ratt, Poison, Whitesnake, Night Ranger, Slayer et al) but never hear the music, which is understandable, because it’s absolute garbage.”

1st objection: since when has Slayer ever stood next to Night Ranger and Whitesnake?!! They’d eat the bands on this list for breakfast.

And 2nd objection: Ratt and Poison are Aqua-Net anointed rock gods.

And hasn’t the ironic hair metal t-shirt trend been around at least as long as the New New Wave trend (4-5 years)? I know this because my old Ratt and Poison t-shirts from the 80’s suddenly attracted a lot of POSITIVE attention starting right after Y2K. Except that I wasn’t wearing them to be ironic.

stc:

“Personally, I think late 70’s/80’s heavy metal - Scorpions, Judas Priest, UFO, Ted Nugent, Motorhead, BOC, Deep Purple - are due for hipster revivalization. Good, fun, stupid music that a lot of people grew up with, professed to hate at the time, but probably still owned. Also, poppy 80’s shit like Go-Go’s, B-52’s, Duran Duran, Squeeze is coming soon.”

Okay, even if you’re playing the NWOBHM and AOR classic rock against the LA hairspray poodles, I don’t see how bands like Cinderella, Ratt and Poison AREN’T “good, fun, stupid music that a lot of people grew up with, professed to hate at the time, but probably still owned.”

Also, where have you been regarding Duran Duran? The Killers owe Simon LeBon their careers, and don’t forget The Bravery, She Wants Revenge, Lansing Dreiden, The Rapture, LCD Soundsystem, and countless other hordes. Striped shirts, Flashdance sweatshirts and leg warmers, studded belts, skinny ties, slanty dyed haircuts, 80’s themed dance parties everywhere–it’s been 1983 for about 5 years now. We’re in the middle of the long, decadent, downhill slope of this revival–even The Killers are cribbing Springsteen and U2 instead of the New Romantics.

It’s been great fun, but we’re about to say sayonara to the New Wave redux era. I think the Horrors might point the way to a new direction for this style: straight into Misfits/Cramps garage psychobilly.

Oh, and The Go-Gos, B-52, Duran Duran and Squeeze are all awesome.

Okay, signing off.

I cultivated an aura of cluelessness regarding popular culture generally. The coolest part of alla that, though, is that I’m discovering all kinds of things that never caught my ear when they were all over the damn place. Like somebody gave me Matthew Sweet’s ‘Girlfriend’ recently and I couldn’t believe it had totally passed me by. Likewise ‘Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.’ So I will take your advice re: Motorhead. And I guess I’ll give the BeeGees a re-listen as well and see if I can’t generate a little more enthusiasm.

Journey has always struck me as a Midwest thing. You get outside of IL, IN, MI, WI, and OH, I bet you won’t hear half of the Journey songs that get constantly played to this day. Likewise, you go to Boston, you’ll hear more Aerosmith songs than you knew existed if you just went by airplay. You can substitute “Cheap Trick,” “REO Speedwagon,” and “Bob Seger” for Journey, and the sentence will still read the same.

For reasons that I have yet to fathom, Sammy Hagar has been monstrously popular in Saint Louis since his days with Montrose back in the 1970s. He’s making an appearance this week to promote a DVD filmed in town last year; his show at the Pageant sold out in two minutes (source). Not being originally from STL, I don’t get the city’s quasi-necrophiliac love of the past, but even by those standards, I’m puzzled by the long-standing love affair with the Red Rocker.

Oh, and I’m going to be on the lookout for a big man, as there’s a big, fat line on the rock flowchart connecting Slade to Cheap Trick and KISS, as well as a nice dotted line to a fair amount of hair-metal bands. I’m not too enamored of the latter, even in a non-ironic fashion owing to actually living through “Unskinny Bop” and “Cherry Pie” receiving heavy rotation on MTV and radio. Slade at least has aged well, given that those guys were already pretty ugly to begin with.

I’ve seen a ton of hair metal T-Shirts in the last year or so (Ratt, Poison, Whitesnake, Night Ranger, Slayer et al) but never hear the music, which is understandable, because it’s absolute garbage.

Personally, I think late 70’s/80’s heavy metal - Scorpions, Judas Priest, UFO, Ted Nugent, Motorhead, BOC, Deep Purple - are due for hipster revivalization. Good, fun, stupid music that a lot of people grew up with, professed to hate at the time, but probably still owned. Also, poppy 80’s shit like Go-Go’s, B-52’s, Duran Duran, Squeeze is coming soon.

It seems to me the hipster revival runs on a 20-25 year cycle (orig. breakthrough to ironic reembrace), but the artist has to have been extremely popular though pretty much universally dismissed or critically disdained at the time of their original run. So, The Police probably won’t get hipster retred cred, while Men at Work or Huey Lewis & The News would.

Just let me know when the John Cougar and REM revivals start, so I can kill myself.

Yes the extended versions of those songs are better but that was hardly the point. Oy.

Why do we insist on calling pop songs guilty pleasures? I thought we were all about harmless pleasure as a moral good here at Pandagon?

Mike Reno could belt it out as good as Steve Perry.

The Kid is Hot Tonight
(Everybody’s) Workin’ for the Weekend
Gangs in the Street
Turn Me Loose
Lucky Ones

Pop rock and unashamedly so.

As far as Journey, “Lights” is on my most-popular personal mix. I agree that “Frontiers” pretty much closed them out though.

Alphabitch, I recommend you immediately click on over to some MP3 blog and listen to “Ace of Spades.” It will be a life changing experience. Then listen to some early Hawkwind, Lemmy’s first band. You find yourself asking, what the hell happened to this hippy between the 70’s and 80’s?

Hmmmm, too much speed, perhaps?