Friday Five: August 1986

I started high school in August 1986.  I’m not one of those people who sits around wishing I could be back in the “glory days” of my youth, but it’s not hard to be nostalgic about that time in your life.

The sounds of those days are etched in my mind in a big way. Here are five songs from the top of the charts in the last week of August 1986.

5. Take Me Home Tonight by Eddie Money
The lead single on Eddie Money’s 1986 album Can’t Hold Back, this single was also the album’s first release. It dropped in August. I bought a Walkman that summer and for some reason this is the song I remember listening to on it. I didn’t know who Eddie Money was at that point but I liked how he sounded. More importantly, I did know who Ronnie Spector was and I loved how she sounded. It was #4 on the rock charts in the last week of August, a harbinger of where it would later peak on the pop charts. (I have no idea why the “official” video is so hard to find in the US.)

4. “Higher Love” by Steve Winwood
Here’s another song by a 70s rock star who, in 1986, I had yet to hear about. It’s also a single that includes vocals by a singer I had heard of, Chaka Khan. “Higher Love” was the #1 song in the country 33 years ago this week, the first chart topper for the veteran rocker from bands like Traffic and Blind Faith, among others. I liked the song in 1986 but not in an obsessive way, it just sounded nice and you didn’t have to work hard to hear it.

3. “Papa Don’t Preach” by Madonna
Every Catholic boy and girl I knew in 1986 (which was kind of the only people I knew) loved Madonna. I didn’t matter what kind of music you were into either. It’s no mystery why, she was a big deal. In a way she was one part of the “holy trinity” that included Michael Jackson and Prince. Though she wasn’t as big as either the other two, those guys could never do what she did. Of course, the pubescent Catholic boys that we were, we loved Madonna for the simple and obvious reason. Her Catholicism and use of Catholic imagery (she often wore a rosary) added to that. It contrasted with her sexual style and lyrics in ways we fell for, though we were oblivious to the obviousness of that attraction. This song (it was #1 on the pop charts earlier in the summer but was at #3 this week) was her most controversial at the time, which is saying something. From what I remember it kind of felt less controversial in the Catholic way, though, but who knows. Side note: the video introduced me to Danny Aiello.

2. “In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel
Another rock star who I hadn’t heard of until 1986, Peter Gabriel’s 1986 album So made him a household name for my generation. This was only a minor hit from the album——it was at #3 on the rock charts this week but never got higher than the 20’s on the Hot 100——but it was helped by songs like “Sledgehammer,” whose video was a game changer. The song would grow in popularity over the span of my high school years, aided by its inclusion in the iconic scene from the 1989 movie Say Anything.

1. “Rumors” by Timex Social Club
It was #8 on the Hot 100 this week, its peak position. But for me, it’s the song I most associate with the summer of 1986 and the start of my high school years. It’s not because of the topic. I wasn’t worried about “rumors” at the start of my high school years and those years never gave me a reason to change that. It was just “the” song a the time. One of my most enduring memories of the song was when one of my friend’s dad was driving us home and he was singing along like a pro——”In a camisole, she’s six feet tall, she’ll knock you to your knees!” This song is a time machine for me and it never fails to put me back to another time.

Querida Familia Latina

Below is a letter signed by more than 200 Latinx artists, writers, and leaders——people like Salma Hayek, Rita Moreno, Edward James Olmos, Eva Longoria, Lin Manuel-Miranda, Sandra Cisneros, José Andrés, and Dolores Huerta.  Printed in the New York Times and major Spanish-language newspapers like La Opinión, El Diario, and El Nuevo Herald, the group writes to all members of la familia Latina and all people of conscience as we collectively face the racial violence and fear of our present moment.

This is moving. This is necessary. This is leadership.

____________________________

Querida Familia Letter
August 16, 2019

https://queridafamilialetter.org/

Querida Familia Latina,

If you are feeling terrified, heartbroken and defeated by the barrage of attacks on our community, you are not alone.

We have been smeared by political rhetoric and murdered in violent hate crimes.

We have been separated from our families and have watched our children caged.

We have been targeted with mass shootings and mass ICE raids meant to terrify us, squash our hope, and break our spirits.

But, we will not be broken. We will not be silenced. We will continue to denounce any hateful and inhumane treatment of our community. We will demand dignity and justice.

Though real pain and fear are sweeping through our communities, we remain powerful. The indignities and cruelty we have endured will never change the truth that the contributions we make to this country are invaluable. Our humanity must be respected. And, we won’t stop organizing for ourselves, our children, and for the soul of this nation.

To our allies who feel our community’s pain, we need you. We cannot make change without your voices and action. We call on you to speak out loudly against hate, to contribute your resources to organizations that support our community, and to hold our leaders accountable.

We ask you to join us in building a better country where we are all safe and valued.

May we turn this time of despair into a time of action. May our love for one another be the guiding light in these dark times.

With our deepest love,

(Signed by over 200 actors, musicians, artists, activists, and labor and civil rights leaders, including José Andrés, Gloria Calderón Kellett, María Teresa Kumar, Sandra Cisneros, Dolores Huerta, Edward James Olmos, Rosario Dawson, Salma Hayek Pinault, Jennifer Lopez, Diego Luna, Ricky Martin, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Nathalie Molina Niño, Janet Murguía, Rosie Perez, Teresa Romero, Gina Rodriguez, Zoe Saldana, Roselyn Sánchez, Tanya Saracho, Bamby Salcedo, Carmen Perez, Tony Plana, Wilmer Valderrama, more)

Friday Five: August 1985

This week’s playlist is 5 songs that made it to the Billboard top 5 in August 1985.

That said, a few non-1985 things deserve mention today. August 15-18 marks the 50th anniversary of Woodstock. Today——August 16th——is the day Santana played, which is epic in so many ways. I loved learning about Woodstock in my teen years and was blown away by the film when I saw it on the 20th anniversary of the legendary music festival.

Today is also the 42nd anniversary of the death of Elvis. It’s always been a day for me to remember the actual day (unlike Woodstock, I was alive for that). Elvis was only 42 when he died, so in about eight months he will have been dead longer than he was alive.

But today is about 1985. So here are some songs that drip, scream, and ooze that glorious year.

5. “Freeway of Love” by Aretha Franklin
The Queen of Soul even had some hits in the 1980s! This was her last #1 single——it topped the the R&B charts for the entire month of August. It even reached the #3 spot on the Hot 100, where she’d hit #7 later in the year with “Who’s Zoomin’ Who?” Aside from the greatest American singer on the mic, this hit features swinging sax by Clarence Clemons.

4. “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straits
As iconic a song of the 80s video era as there ever was. With vocal assistance from Sting (“I want my MTV…”) and one of the most memorable guitar licks of the 80s, the song was the biggest pop success for a rock band that had been making a name for themselves in the UK since the 70s. The original song and video (below) even features a taste of the homophobic masculinity of a lot of rock. (The “faggot” verse was cut from later airings and radio play.) It hit #1 on the rock charts for three weeks in August ’85 and did the same in late September on the Hot 100.

3. “Power of Love” by Huey Lewis & the News
This hit single was from the soundtrack to the even bigger hit of a film Back to the Future released that same summer. It preceded “Money for Nothing” at the #1 spot on the rock charts (it was #1 for two weeks in July) and stayed in the top 5 there for most of August——the same month it topped the Hot 100 for two weeks. It was the first time the Bay Area rockers topped the US pop charts.

2. “Saving All My Love for You” by Whitney Houston
It peaked at #2 on the R&B charts in mid-August and then dropped to #3 by the end of the month, only to hit the top spot in the first week of September. It would do the same on the Hot 100, but not until October. The second single from her debut album, Houston was just at the start of a career of hits. For my money, this is one of her best and one of my favorites. The song was part of the plot of an episode of the TV show Silver Spoons——the show starring Ricky Schroder——on which she also guest starred. That was one of my shows, but it’s the story of the song (told through the vantage point of “the other woman”) and her vocals that stuck with me even then.

1. “Shout” by Tears for Fears
I put this song at the top of my list specifically because I never really liked it. That’s because at the same time, the song was hard not to hear on Top 40 radio. It was on all the time! And that means I had to think about how much I didn’t like the song frequently, which means it’s a big part of my 1985. When I hear the song today, I don’t change the channel. It’s an alright song (kind of basic but undeniably catchy) that really deserves respect for being a part of most people’s version of 1985. It was #1 on the Hot 100 for three weeks, just before Huey Lewis.

Friday Five: August 1984

My weekly music posts are a chance to tell me biography in micro form though something that I loved and continue to love. There’s an inherent nostalgia in that, one I’m happy to embrace. This week it might be hard for me to avoid it.

It’s easy for me to be nostalgic about 1984. I turned 12 that year, and even then it felt like the start of a new period in life. In retrospect, it was probably the start of my long teenage period where you’ve got one foot in being a kid and another on the cusp of adulthood. It’s like a stretch where you can never reach the thing you’re reaching for but it also never quite feels out of reach.

The movies that changed my life that year were perfect artifacts of that same dynamic. Gremlins and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom both came out, inspiring the need for the PG-13 rating. Movies like Ghostbusters, Sixteen Candles, The Natural, The Karate Kid, and Romancing the Stone were not only entertaining, they also made me and my friends feel like we were peaking into a grown-up world that was (or would be) for us.

This week I want to capture the feel of August 1984. I have something to say about all these songs, even though I wasn’t a huge lover of all of them. Still, they are each a slice of 1984.

5. “Round and Round” by Ratt
This one would later peak at #11 but it was moving up with a bullet in August 1984. Quiet Riot and their massive hit “Cum On Feel the Noize” dropped the previous year. Early in 1984 Van Halen released 1984 and shortly after the Scorpions released Love at First Sting. That’s the short version of my first steps into the hard rock and heavy metal world. This song sounded harder than pop at the time and even a little harder than the hard rock. Stephen Pearcy’s vocals not only had an edge to them, they communicated a kind of disdain that felt good. Liking this song made me feel “metal” even though it was more in the line of the big hair 80s rock that would explode on MTV throughout the decade. I love it still.

4. “Dancing in the Dark” by Bruce Springsteen
I had never heard of Bruce Springsteen until 1984. The weirdest thing about that was all these people you saw on TV who not only had heard of him, they worshipped him. This song didn’t help me understand that at all, but it was a catchy song that appealed to a lot of us. The first single from his Born in the U.S.A. album (which is one of the best-selling albums of all-time), it peaked at #2 in early summer and was on its way down the charts by August. It was still in heavy video rotation, though. And people couldn’t stop talking about “the short-haired girl” he danced with on stage. If somebody my age sees somebody dance like these two dance in the video (something that doesn’t and shouldn’t happen all that often) they immediately think of this video.

3. “Ghostbusters” by Ray Parker Jr.
It was the cultural phenomenon of the 1984 charts. The theme song to a great comedic film which killed at the box office. It was the second highest grossing film of the year and——at the time——the highest grossing comedy in cinematic history. The song might not have been as financially successful, but it was as big a pop cultural hit. It peaked at #1 for three weeks in August. You couldn’t turn on a radio that summer without hearing it at least once. And everybody was going around asking each other “Who you gonna call?”

2. “When Doves Cry” by Prince
Everybody I knew loved Prince. Many people I knew loved him the way others love Michael Jackson (or the way those older people we saw on TV liked Bruce Springsteen). 1984 was the year of Purple Rain and this song from the album (which was a soundtrack to the film) was the first single released from it. It was Prince’s first number one hit record, topping the charts for five weeks ending the first week of August. I suppose the staying power of the song means it’s kind of timeless for most folks. For me it is, but at the same time it sounds exactly like 1984 to me, too. Musically, it’s just about as perfect as perfect comes.

1. What’s Love Got to Do with It” by Tina Turner
I was raised on a lot of “oldies”——mostly a lot of 50s, 60s, and 70s R&B and soul. Still, I didn’t know Tina Turner until 1984. I probably wasn’t alone. What I remember about the hype surrounding this song (what you heard on talk shows, on entertainment news, and on the radio) was the way it was a comeback for a music artist, one that catapulted her (at the very non-pop star age of 44) to even greater heights than she had known in the past. Her first release from her massively popular album Private Dancer, the song became her first and only #1 and her first top ten single since the early 1970s. Few songs sound more like 1984 than this hit, and few songs demand your attention like it does. When we saw her perform this on TV everyone would always say “Look at her! She’s still got it!” What we didn’t fully understand was that the power of Tina Turner is that she just can’t ever lose it.

Invasion Politics

Fox and Friends is a morning show on the “news” station we know as Fox.

As any regular watcher of late-night comedy shows knows, the hosts spend a good chunk of time defending racist-in-chief Donald J. Trump. Today, Brian Kilmeade (who is one of those hosts) had this to say in defense of the wide spread calling out the President for his frequent and habitual use of the word “invasion” when discussing the passage of Spanish-speaking migrants across our border:

What the president has during his two and a half years is a major problem at the border which was not his doing——unless you want to blame President Obama for the unaccompanied minors that streamed through here in 2014. When you have over 110,000 people coming a month, over a million last year and then well over a million this year, if you use the term “an invasion” that’s not anti-Hispanic, it’s a fact. [Source]

The Merrian-Webster dictionary defines the word “invasion” like this:

1: an act of invading (especially an incursion of an army for conquest or plunder)
2: the incoming or spread of something usually hurtful

When you have a million people a year——not one solider but hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children——trying to cross your border and enter your country, the only “fact” is that you are witnessing a refugee crisis. De-humanizing language that portrays poor migrant families in need of refuge as a danger, a threat, and an attempt to “take over” the country are not only wrong, they are openly racist.