I ain't gonna be your fool no more

Today is the second day of genuine, approved Canadian Content on the Crusty Curmudgeon. New Wave band Platinum Blonde was often compared to Duran Duran for their image and the stylish look of their videos. It probably didn't hurt to have a lead singer who was a British expatriate and has a similar vocal style to Simon le Bon.

Their earliest hits, such as "Standing in the Dark" and "It Doesn't Really Matter" were more political (though it didn't hinder the latter from being used in Labatt's beer ads) but by their second album, Alien Shores, they'd more or less switched over to standard pop topics.

Alien Shores was Platinum Blonde's most successful album, certified quintuple platinum. "Platinum" in Canada means 80,000 units sold, which doesn't sound like much - but when you consider that a) Canada has a tenth the population of the U.S.; b) thus the sales threshold is roughly proportional to the RIAA's platinum certification of 1 million units; and c) Platinum Blonde was virtually unknown outside of Canada, 400,000 sales is quite respectable indeed. (I'm sure most American rock performers only daydream of selling 5 million albums.) Alien Shores contains Platinum Blonde's one American hit, "Somebody Somewhere," but for today I've chosen to highlight the lead single, "Crying Over You":

[Lyrics]

The guitar solo, incidentally, was performed by the redoubtable Alex Lifeson, of Rush, which is the closest they will come to putting in an appearance this week, at least for this round of CanCon.

Why must I always say it again?

Since Canada Day is this Wednesday, I'm going to close off the Summer of Fun 80s nostalgia trip with the obligatory Canadian Content.

I know I've got a fair number of American readers (and not a few American "friends" on Facebook), who may be familiar with a few of these songs. If the rest are obscure, rest assured they received significant airplay on Canadian radio stations in their time. Canadian broadcasting regulations stipulate that radio stations must meet a certain quota of Canadian content, or "CanCon" (30% in the 1980s, and currently 35%). The intention was to promote indigenous Canadian talent by increasing its visibility (audibility?). A good idea in principle - but for every successful Bryan Adams or Celine Dion, there were a dozen "hothouse flowers," performers that flourished under the CanCon regs but were otherwise unheard of outside of their region. Maybe when I do this again, I'll devote a week strictly to the hothouse flowers, but I believe that all five of this week's performers gained at least some exposure in the United States.

Today's song is a hard rock classic: "New Girl Now" by the Niagara Falls group Honeymoon Suite:

[Lyrics]

Nothing much more to say. I always just liked Johnny Dee's voice. Also, the video has a DeLorean in it.

Come on and twist a little closer now

The last 80s movie hit of this week didn't even start as an 80s hit.

"Twist and Shout" was recorded by the Beatles in 1963 for their first album, Please Please Me. Unlike many of their hits, it wasn't written by them: it was originally penned by R&B songwriters Phil Medley and Bert Russell, and had been previously recorded by the Top Notes and the Isley Brothers before the Fab Four recorded it. "Twist and Shout" peaked at #2 on the Billboard Hot 100, but since the #1 single was "Can't Buy Me Love" and this was the legendary week when the entire top 5 was held by the Beatles - an unprecedented and unrepeated feat - I doubt they were complaining.

"Twist and Shout" charted again in 1986, thanks to being featured in yet another John Hughes teen movie: Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Matthew Broderick memorably lipsynchs to it during the annual Von Steuben Day parade in Chicago:

Reportedly, Paul McCartney was not thrilled with the addition of the horns.

Incidentally, of the four teen movies represented in this week's playlist, Ferris Bueller's Day Off is the only one I saw while still in my teens: in early 1990, while I was 19. I was, however, well out of high school by this time . . .

Michael Jackson (1958-2009)

The King of Pop, Michael Jackson, died suddenly yesterday afternoon in Los Angeles at the age of 50.

I've made no secret of my love for 80s music, and there is no one from the 80s as iconic as Jackson. Already famous as a member of the Jackson 5, his 1982 album Thriller turned him into a superstar.

I "predicted" about 15 years ago that Jackson, like Elvis Presley, would be undone by his own celebrity. Sadly, that appears to be the case. Both Elvis' and Jackson's careers were at their peaks about 20 years prior to their deaths; both grew increasingly eccentric over time; both had unsuccessful marriages (Jackson's, coincidentally, to Preston's daughter); both died untimely deaths at roughly the same age.

Jackson's genuine talent has been overshadowed in recent years by his personal, financial, and legal troubles, as well as his personal eccentricities, most notably his constant changes of appearance due to cosmetic surgery. I won't minimize those problems - "he's a celebrity, and celebrities are known for doing weird things" is really not an excuse for anything - but it's easy to forget that before he became a walking freakshow, Jackson was an R&B legend of considerable talent. I will still spin Thriller regularly, because it is a near-perfect pop album. This 1983 clip, from the Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, and Forever television special, introduced viewers to Jackson's phenomenal dancing talent, including his signature dance move, the Moonwalk:

RIP, Michael Jackson.

And now . . . this - June 25/09

Well, what did you think it was?

Wallabies are getting high on opium from poppy fields and flattening crops, an Australian official has said.

The marsupials have been snacking on poppies growing in fields in Tasmania, the world's largest producer of legally-grown optium for medicines.

Afterwards, they hop round in circles before crashing on top of the crops and trampling them to the ground.

[Full Story]

So it's not UFOs, it's not "vortexes," and it's not Doug and Dave. It's drunk marsupials. Don't you hate it when the world gets a little less mysterious?

Don't tell me you didn't see this from a mile away

The Belgian teen-ager who made headlines across the globe after claiming a tattoo artist had drawn 56 stars on her face, rather than the three she asked for, has admitted she lied.

Kimberley Vlaeminck from the city of Kortrijk, 90 km (56 miles) northwest of Brussels said she fell asleep during the procedure, and woke up in pain when her nose was being tattooed.

But the 18-year-old was caught off camera on Dutch television when she said she quite liked the tattoo, but lied about asking for all 56 stars when she saw her father's furious reaction.

[Full Story]

I'm shocked. Shocked!

If you have a dose of a freaky ghost, baby

Time to take a break from teen-angst movies.

The most successful comedy of the 1980s was Ivan Reitman's 1984 film Ghostbusters. Its theme song, by Ray Parker Jr., was one of the most successful hits of the year. You wouldn't think that a mock jingle about a pest control business that gets rid of ghosts would be hit material, but "Ghostbusters" spent three weeks at the top of the Billboard singles chart, anyway.

The video for "Ghostbusters" was also one of the most creative of the decade: a woman is spooked by a translucent Parker in a specially built haunted house consisting almost entirely of neon outlines. It's also notable for the number of celebrity cameos: Chevy Chase, Melissa Gilbert, Al Franken, George Wendt, and many others took a turn shouting out the song's catchphrase, "Who you gonna call?":

[Lyrics]

Parker was sued later that year by the News' frontman Huey Lewis, who claimed that "Ghostbusters" had plagiarized their own song "I Want a New Drug." They settled out of court and the settlement was bound by a confidentiality agreement. In 2001, Parker sued Lewis for supposedly breaching the agreement and implying on a television show that the settlement had involved a monetary payment.

Seven years went under the bridge like time was standing still

A year after The Breakfast Club, John Hughes made Pretty in Pink: another movie about high-school cliques, again starring Molly Ringwold.

While OK, Pretty in Pink isn't as memorable as The Breakfast Club, and the same is true of its soundtrack, which features primarily 80s alternative acts such as Echo and the Bunnymen, New Order, and the Psychedelic Furs (whose song "Pretty in Pink" was the inspiration for the movie). The Danny Hutton Hitters' cover of "Wouldn't It Be Good", originally by Nik Kershaw, is pretty good. But the best song from the movie is Orchestral Manoevres in the Dark's "If You Leave," which became their biggest hit:

While I'm ambivalent about the movie and most of the soundtrack, I've loved this song from the first time I heard it played.

(By request, I'm going to start adding links to the lyrics from now on, as well.)

Will you recognize me? Call my name or walk on by?

[Late again! I'm losing my touch.]

In the 1980s, John Hughes was The King of teenage comedies. With two successful films under his belt (National Lampoon's Vacation and Sixteen Candles, Hughes went on to release one of the defining "Brat Pack" movies: 1985's The Breakfast Club. In this film, five high-school students from different social strata are thrown together in the library for a Saturday detention session. Inevitable hijinks result, resulting in some close bonding.

But at the end of the story, the question arises: what happens Monday morning? Do the five continue to acknowledge the friendship that's grown between them, or do they play to type and ignore each other's presence again? The Breakfast Club's theme song, performed by the Scottish New Wave group Simple Minds, asks the same question, pleading: "Don't You (Forget About Me)."

This seems to be one of those rare songs that doesn't have an official video posted to YouTube, at least not one that hasn't been mangled in some way. So I settled for Simple Minds' performance at Live Aid, the same summer:

I saw The Breakfast Club for the first time about three years ago, and realized I couldn't have related to it much when I was still in high school. I just never suffered all that teen angst. I was never especially popular or unpopular; I was just middle-of-the-road. And I wasn't a jock, loser, nerd, prince[ss] or head case, either, just a band geek on the honour roll. Similarly, I didn't relate too much to "Don't You (Forget About Me)" until years later when nostalgia kicked in. But in hindsight, I would consider this hit fourth on my list of "Eightiesest Songs of the Eighties."

Kick off your Sunday shoes

Why? Because it's Monday, and 80s nostalgia continues. This week's theme: Movie music.

It was George Lucas' 1973 blockbuster American Graffiti that started the trend of using popular music, rather than a traditional score, as the soundtrack to the plot. (The irony is that his collaboration with John Williams, for his next film, resulted in the greatest traditional score of all time.) By the 1980s, this trend was in full swing: predominantly, though not exclusively, in the teen movie genre, following in American Graffiti's footsteps.

I have seen all the movies represented in this week's lineup. Oddly enough, I saw only one of the teen movies while still in my teens, but by then I'd also left high school. That's what happens when you live in a small town with limited entertainment options, and friends who, if I went to a party at their place, were more likely to rent action or comedy than teen-angsty stuff. Most of them I've seen for the first time in the last 5 years.

I was brought up in a small town with moderately strict moral boundaries, but they didn't include not going to dances or listening to rock music. So I can't really sympathize with the plot of 1984's Footloose: a city teenager moves to a small town where both are banned, and fights the law and a strict local minister in order to allow a senior prom. But the music - released in the spring and summer before I started high school - was wonderful. Footloose spawned a handful of hits: Deniece Williams' poppy "Let's Hear It for the Boy," Bonnie Tyler's "Holding Out for a Hero," and Mike Reno and Ann Wilson's power ballad "Almost Paradise." But none of them were as catchy or just as fun to listen to as the title track itself, performed by Kenny Loggins:

"Footloose" spent three weeks at #1 in the spring of 1984. The chorus invites everybody to "cut footloose" - and with a song like this, you just gotta.

Er war Superstar, er war populär

One interesting thing I noticed while selecting this week's songs, was that there are few to no hit songs from southern Europe that make it big in North America. I guess that the southern Europeans - the French, Italians, Spanish, Greeks, and so forth - must spend their time drinking wine and sunbathing on the Mediterranean, leaving us cold Germanic folk to write all the loud music. All my selections were from northern Europe and Scandinavia, and if I'd widened my list, I could have continued in that trend: "Twilight Zone" by Golden Earring (the Netherlands); "Rock You Like a Hurricane" by the Scorpions and "99 Luftballoons" by Nena (Germany); "The Look" and "Dangerous" by Roxette (Sweden); or, of course, "Oh Yeah" by Yello (Switzerland).

And, representing Austria, there's Falco, whose biggest hit is my personal favourite of this theme, "Rock Me Amadeus":

Written to cash in on the recent success of the movie Amadeus, "Rock Me Amadeus" likens Mozart to a modern rock star: the video shows Falco, in modern semi-formal wear, entertaining an eighteenth-century audience; meanwhile, Falco-as-Mozart performs to the adulation of a crowd of bikers. In Canada, I recall that the version of this song that got the most airplay was actually an abbreviated version of the "Salieri" remix, in which the verses were eliminated and a bridge section listed the highlights of Mozart's life.

Falco is often wrongly considered a one-hit wonder in North America, as the success of "Amadeus" overshadows his two other more modest hits, "Der Komissar" and "Vienna Calling." Thus far, Falco is the only artist to score a #1 hit with a German-language song. Sadly, he would never top the success of "Rock Me Amadeus" before his untimely death in a car accident in 1998; he was 40.