guilty pleasure monday! – Page 15

Category: guilty pleasure monday!

guilty pleasure monday: things can only get better (HoJo)

Posted on March 3, 2008 by wrekehavoc

i need to be an equal opportunity decade offender, but somehow, the 1980s gave me a lot of fodder that makes it into this category. and howard jones, he of the fluffy cockatiel hair (which i ended up with circa 1986) (there are pictures, i’m mortified to state), fits the bill with things can only get better.

this is a great song when you’re on the elliptical, i must tell you — crank the resistance up to 12 and try to dance around. but back in the day, when my hair was well on its way to its biggest and scariest incarnation, i loved this song. why? well, in 1985/6, i felt like things were in a bit of a shambles. i was transferring back home to rutgers (motto: no one wants to call it new jersey university) because i missed the seasons and because i felt like a part of me was losing my mind living in a place where i really, really didn’t belong. (meaning miami. not the people i went to school with. i am still close with several people from UM, some of whom actually live in and around miami to this day.) i don’t regret my time in miami for a second — it was a world i don’t think i would have otherwise experienced, and i learned a lot while there about people, places, and things that wash up on the beach at night that smell funny.

in short, i traded a beach for a blizzard.

i also was knee-deep in a relationship with a person i would call hamlet. he’s really a good person; he just didn’t know what he wanted at the time, rendering me a bit of a wreck. i was hopeful i could figure out whether things would work from a closer distance, though that wasn’t the driving force of returning to NJ. i just missed the place; and the english department at RU was (and still is) top-notch.

so, i packed my teeny canary yellow toyota tercel (with black pleather interior and no A/C in miami — talk about a great car to have in the heat!) and shifted my way up to the auto train with my mom in tow. after my car was completely saturated with dead love bugs on the FL Turnpike, we boarded the auto train (the two youngest people on board, and she was a little older than 40 ;-), and i planned to start over again in the garden spot of new brunswick, nj.

yep. things. can. only. get. better.

only no one told me they’d get worse before they got better. i felt really alienated my first semester, though i thrived academically and was accepted into the honors english program. and hamlet? well, that didn’t work out, and i was a bit of a human disaster for a few months.

but things DID get better after that. a LOT better.

so every time i listen to howard jones, i always remember that things can always get better. you just have to wait some times. and other times, you have to hit a lower bottom before things are on the up-and-up. and other times…

well. you get the picture.

guilty pleasure monday: venus and mars/rockshow (wings)

Posted on February 25, 2008December 11, 2014 by wrekehavoc

it’s no secret i love the beatles, and i am ashamed very little by them (ok, so qualifiers include the entire magical mystery tour movie (motto: we’re stoned, and we don’t even care if the Queen knows it) and their worst song ever, mr. moonlight.) it must be apparent — one of the major search terms that brings people to wreke land is paul mccartney. and i cut wings a lot of slack. after all, i decided i would marry macca when i was 4; and i didn’t really switch favorite beatle allegiance to john until i was well into adulthood. i heart paul. and i still do.

(paul, if you’re listening: i’ll sign a pre-nup! really!)

anyway, i grew up with wings; since the beatles didn’t tour, it was about as close as i could get… i would wait with bated breath until the latest albums would come out, as late as 1980 before i began to wonder why i was still listening to stuff that older folks liked. i still think band on the run is a solid work; but i must confess that i also adore venus and mars, a loopy LP that i think paul clearly wrote with huge stadium concerts in mind. and the single venus and mars/rockshow totally caters to that idea. sure, there are adorably whimsical lyrics elsewhere on the album which i frequently quote when i am talking about my BS; and letting go is a killer song.

but rockshow is exactly what my 11 year old, never-been-to-a-rock-show self thought that rock shows must be like: loud and energetic and exciting… which they have been, though not always. there have been shows where i wondered why the artist even showed. (there have even been shows where i pondered whether the artist onstage was, in fact, a cardboard cutout propped on the stage. but i digress…)

i was a bit chagrined when i saw sir paul for the first (and only) time in 1993. i thought he was rather hammy: look at me, the cute one, i could sit here and fart and you’d cheer. it made me a bit angry at the time, especially since i had spent a lot of money for tickets that were waaaaaay in the back of RFK stadium. but since he lost his wife and then subsequently started getting screwed over by his second wife, i’ve softened a lot.

(if you’re out there, paul, i promise, i won’t marry you for the money. just let me hear you every day and that will be enough.)

guilty pleasure monday: p. y. t. (michael jackson)

Posted on February 18, 2008 by wrekehavoc

guilty pleasure monday, dubbed today g. p. m. in honor of my next honoree, michael jackson, and his early 80’s hit p. y. t.

oh please. if you’re over the age of about 39, you danced to this at least 10 times if you had a life back in the day. you know you did. and i did, too, at all those stupid fraternity parties i went to when i was a freshman who didn’t know that there was intelligent life out there beyond campus. yep, those delightful parties where it was 1000 degrees inside a small place where everyone was dancing? where stupid people like me drank the jim jones punch because we thought it was the non-alcoholic alternative?

and p.y.t. was one of the songs i remember from that time. of course, it has a more positive memory — a memory of times when we drove in my friend debbie’s car (she was the only one of my frosh friends i could recall who had a car) over the rickenbacker over to crandon park, where we would sit on the beach — and study! yes, i was that much of a dork to actually study on the beach at key biscayne. and better still — my friends studied, too!

yes: develop skin cancer AND develop your mind, all at the same time. it’s genius.

but i liked the song, enough to let my aforementioned friend debbie convince me to spend $30 dollars — 30 WHOLE dollars — to see michael and his brothers perform at the orange bowl. back then, $30 for a ticket was highway robbery. and i did it. what do i remember about that show? mostly a young african american lady screaming in my ear for what seemed like forever: MICHAEL, MICHAEL, I LOVE YOU, MICHAEL!

sometimes, i hear it in my dreams.

and considering the show they put on that day, it’s actually better that i remember her.

michael went downhill for me after that — i don’t think i really ever recovered much past ben, anyway — but man, i must admit — i didn’t own thriller — i am not one of the gazillion people who bought it and made it the best-selling album ever — but i sure wanted to borrow it and tape it.

which i never actually did, now that i think of it…

guilty pleasure monday: the wall (kansas)

Posted on February 11, 2008 by wrekehavoc

the grammys (tagline: we only reward artists after they’re dead, irrelevant, or past their best work) have inspired me. i’m thinking it is time for a theme, at least until i get bored with the idea 😉

so welcome to the inaugural post of guilty pleasure monday, where i’ll talk about a song i love, a song i listen to at times when i think no one is around, a song i might sing at the top of my lungs except for the fact that BS will look at me with that face that says you know, i thought you were cool once, but you’re just one giant sap.

so today’s gem: the wall by that prog rock band kansas. you know, the ones who gave us point of know return and carry on wayward son? oh, and the one my mother refers to as the all-time, #1 depressing song, dust in the wind?

and yes, i did sing this at the top of my lungs at one time in my life. i absolutely identified with the idea that there was a wall that i had to overcome; a wall of being who i wanted to be and not who everyone else thought i should be. yes, the stuff that 19 year olds everywhere feel; only instead of going punk like every other self-respecting person of my era, i dug deeper into prog rock. (i don’t think punk ever made it to miami.)

anyway, back to the top-of-my-lungs-singing bit. fortunately, when i was doing it, i was enclosed in a soundproof booth at the university of miami (motto: the harvard of the south), witnessed only by my best mate murph, a person who still admits publicly that she’s my friend in spite of the fact that i’m a dork and made her listen to me sing and play piano back in the day. so, back in that noisy day, i attended UM for two years. you should know that while it has earned its rep as suntan u, UM truly has an amazing music school, which boasts a zillion great musicians — pat metheny, for one. and it reserved its pi-anos, housed in little glass soundproof closets, for said music school kids.

of which i was not.

i did find a very nice guy in the music school, a man who i have since googled and have found that he plays professionally in a jazz duo with his significant other. and this adorable man, who at age 20 looked like an older version of christopher robin, let me borrow his university photo ID every time i wanted to play. it’s a credit to the people at the front desk that never did they ponder why i didn’t have short, light brown hair, or wasn’t a boy, for that matter. they just let me go.

and one of the first things i would sing and play at the VERY TIPPY TOP OF MY LUNGS was the wall. not the we don’t need no education wall. the dark and silent barrier between all i am and all i ever hope to be wall.

i still love this song, even though i probably have since written graffiti, removed chunks, and finally leaped over that wall. metaphorically speaking, of course. all things that would probably disturb the song’s author, who has since become a born-again christian. but i digress.

(did i mention that murph is still my friend some 25 years later? in spite of my dorkiness?)