The Popdose staff was sitting around the other day, doing what we do best — namely, talking about records that most people wish they didn’t remember — when a discussion about the Moody Blues’ “Your Wildest Dreams” somehow led into some heavy-duty reminiscing about the records we all listened to when we were kids — and how those records were more or less culled from the Top 40 hits of the day, hits that our parents, as often as not, listened to along with us.

So, we wondered, who’s making music these days that impressionable preteens and their parents enjoy? Top 40 radio is pretty much dead, and the lines between Radio Disney, MTV, and whatever the hell it is that the over-30 crowd is listening to these days have been drawn depressingly deep. Look, it isn’t just that we think the Jonas Brothers and Lil Wayne aren’t all that great; it’s that some of us can remember enjoying the latest hits from the Spinners, the Bangles, or Cheap Trick right alongside our parents.

Current music is still a multigenerational thing, but not the way it used to be — so here, without further ado, is a list (with downloads, natch) of some of the stuff your faithful Popdosers were listening to in their formative preteen years. Pull up a chair and a set of headphones, and give in to Tweener Mixtape Madness! (more…)

David Medsker: I love Paul Carrack as much as the next guy, but is what I refer to as a non-song. Not a whole lot of meat on these bones.

Jeff Giles: An odd little hit from an odd little record. People remember Paul Carrack and Paul Young (no, the other Paul Young) as Mike +/& the Mechanics’ singers, but this album featured lead vocals from two other guys. I can’t remember either of their names, but I do remember that I like “Taken In” more than “Silent Running” or “All I Need Is a Miracle.”

Jon Cummings: If I remember correctly, M+M albums were packaged with drool cups. Or did I just dream that during the 48-hour nap that was induced by my one and only full hearing of this song? Even 23 years on, it’s extraordinary that a nuclear war/Terminator/whatever prog-rock “epic” could be so abysmally boring. (Compared to this oblique blather, Sting’s contemporaneous “Russians” was a Tolstoy novel.) It’s also extraordinary that Carrack’s voice could be so thoroughly wasted. His M+M work is so pulse-deadening that it calls into question everything he did before. (Was “How Long” really that good? Doesn’t Glenn Tilbrook sing “Tempted” just as well in concert as Carrack did on record?) God, I hated this band.

Dw. Dunphy: Mike + the Mechanics got off to a good start, didn’t they? Big hit, nice synth-y melody, Paul Carrack — but it’s all for naught. I don’t understand a whit of this song. It sounds like the theme to some really bad syndicated sci-fi show. If you don’t pay too much attention to it, perfectly pleasant.

Scott Malchus: I often wonder what songs from the ’80s, with all of the lame electronic drums and synths, would sound like with real instruments. This song holds up okay. I guess I always expected more from Mike Rutherford since he was the lead guitarist from Genesis (and, before that, the bassist). All of the Mike + the Mechanics songs sound very “lite rock” compared to what he did in the ’70s. Then again, look at Phil Collins’s solo output. Worse, look what Genesis had become by the end of the ’80s. How is it that only Peter Gabriel was able to maintain his artistic integrity after he quit the band?

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Rick Springfield is getting something of a career re-boot this week. Twenty-seven years after “Jessie’s Girl” and the Working Class Dog album made him one of the ’80s’ first superstars, Springfield is ubiquitous once again – if only for a few days: Good Morning America, Live with Regis and Kelly, Fox and Friends, Nightline on Friday evening. He even returned to his old haunting grounds on the General Hospital set, singing his new single “What’s Victoria’s Secret?” in the guise of aging rocker Eli Love. (See, Love is a doppelganger for Springfield’s classic character, Dr. Noah Drake, who one time had to fill in when Eli … oh, never mind.)

All this renewed attention accompanies Springfield’s fine new album, Venus in Overdrive. It’s his first for the New Door label, which has built a roster of “heritage” artists that’s beginning to look like a Behind the Music episode guide. In Springfield’s case, New Door has exhibited a knack for exploiting pre-existing name recognition and for coaxing familiar-yet-fresh music from an artist who has seemingly done it all before. The title track is a song Chris Daughtry might wish he’d written, while “What’s Victoria’s Secret?” feels like 1981 again, but in a good way, reminding us why “I’ve Done Everything for You” and “I Get Excited” were such terrific power-pop (while not-so-subtly echoing the guitar riff that helped drive “Jessie’s Girl” to the top).

Popdose caught up with Springfield on Tuesday, shortly after his appearance with Reege.

Did the show go well this morning?
I don’t know! I’m the last person to ask. I never have any idea how I come off on TV. They tell me it was fine, so I just take their word for it and go on to the next thing.

So, listen, Rick: Some screaming girl I didn’t even know dug her fingernails into my forearm during one of your concerts in 1982. I still have the scar.
Oh, man. (Laughing) You’re not gonna sue me, are you?

No, but I would like an apology.
Oh, I don’t know. I think there’s a statute of limitations on those sorts of things, isn’t there? So… (assuming voice of Nelson from The Simpsons) Ha-ha! (more…)

By now it’s a cliché, though often a useful one, to allow a particular song to remind you of a certain time or place – that summer fling at the beach, that interminable drive to your grandmother’s, that drug-addled suicide attempt…

Usually in those situations, you can actually remember both the time and the song. The other day, however, with iTunes on shuffle and my thoughts distracted by some dude I never heard of trying to “friend” me on Facebook, I was suddenly transported back to 1981 and a long bus ride to a basketball playoff game with a gaggle of cheerleaders. (Such was frequently my fate in high school, as anyone who read my sadsack entry in Popdose’s “Songs for the Dumped” series might recall.) The trouble was, while the memory was crystal clear in an instant, I had no clue what the song was for a full minute, until the chorus at long last kicked in.

Thus was I re-introduced to Franke & the Knockouts’ “Sweetheart” (download), a Top 10 hit from that spring of ’81. A few notes of that overly bright keyboard intro, a line or two of Franke Previte’s vocals straining to break free of the song’s vice-like MOR grip, and an entire pop-radio playlist springs instantly to mind: “Morning Train,” “Kiss on My List,” “Keep on Loving You,” “Woman,” “Being With You,” “The Best of Times,” Stanley Clarke & George Duke’s “Sweet Baby,” the Alan Parsons Project’s “Time” … “The One That You Love” (I didn’t say it was a great playlist). The sound is somehow indelible, lodged in that time when disco was dead (except for Kool & the Gang), so was John Lennon, the charts were unbelievably tame, and the Next Cool Thing was hiding somewhere in England, in Minneapolis, or in Athens, Georgia.

Why did I buy a copy of “Sweetheart”? I don’t remember, but it probably had something to do with that bus ride and whichever cheerleader I was pointlessly obsessing over at the time. Nevertheless, my hard-earned $1.19 (the sticker’s still on the sleeve) contributed to the rapid rise of Mr. Previte, who — after knocking around for a decade with two different bands, to no great artistic or financial end — formed a third one, got signed and scored three Top 40 hits within 15 months. (Those other two bands? The Boston-based Oxford Watch Band — hello, late ’60s! — and a heavy-metal act called Bull Angus. Who knew Franke & the Knockouts were actually Spinal Tap?)

“Sweetheart” was the first of them; like the others, it was co-written by Previte and Knockouts guitarist Billy Elworthy. Its lyric was rather sticky, with some deliciously stupid bits (my favorite being the verse that starts with a Telly Savalas “Who loves you, baby?” and goes on to proclaim that “You’re the funk in my life/Yeah, day and night.” As a bonus, it was accompanied by one of those early videos that were too obvious by half — see if you can spot the allusion to the band’s name — and fairly screamed “We don’t know what the hell to do with this new medium!” (more…)

Nearly lost amid the fantastic PR (so far) and blind luck of Barack Obama’s Middle East tour – and the horror show that has been John McCain’s pathetic, flailing response to it – an astonishing story has developed in deepest Serbia this week. Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader who oversaw the rape of Sarajevo, the massacre at Srebrenica and the slaughter of more than 100,000 Muslims during the early 1990s, was finally captured in Belgrade after years in hiding.

The sizzle in this steak is partly in the circumstances: Karadzic, living under the name Dragan Dabic, was masquerading as a long-haired and bearded alternative-medicine guru who claimed to be able to treat everything from impotence to autism. (Thank goodness for that client who demanded an investigation after his erection not only lasted longer than four hours, but spent the whole time watching Judge Wapner and insisting it was “a very good driver.”)

Seeing Karadzic’s pompadour and sloe-eyed mug again, after all these years, couldn’t help but place Obama and McCain’s squabbling over Middle East politics into a fresh context. After all, here was a guy who, at the time of his disappearance in 1995, had been supervising a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing for four years. Here was a guy who, in cahoots with his buddy Slobodan Milosevic, brought nearly a decade of war, rape and outright genocide to the former Yugoslavia in order to make that land safe for a single ethnic group.

These were guys, in short, who needed to be Gotten Rid Of, and fast. Sounds a lot like the argument against Saddam Hussein, doesn’t it? Sure, if we’re talking about the aggressive, gassy Saddam of 1990-91, and not the boxed-in, sanctioned-to-his-eyeballs, no-fly-zoned (and, let’s not forget, no-WMD’d) Saddam of 2002-03. (more…)

One of my favorite Popdose experiences to date came in the wake of Part 9 in our colleague Dave Steed’s wonderful “Bottom Feeders” series. He had identified his first CD purchase, and dozens of his readers spontaneously took the opportunity to share their firsts — CDs, LPs, singles, MP3s, etc. In a shameless attempt to replicate the Kumbaya togetherness of that key moment in Popdose history, I’m launching an occasional series inviting readers to share your experiences as fans, haters, critics and/or ignorers of some of the greatest acts in rock history.

The rules will be simple. Every few weeks I’ll choose an act, offer up a story about a particular song that has affected me, and then open up the request lines for you to talk about a song by the same act that has affected you, positively or negatively. (If you’d like to suggest an act for a future column and offer your own story – in essence, to take over the column for a week – please write me at jon.) I’m counting on you all; if you don’t play along, I’ll kill the column and I’ll be very, very disappointed in you.

Starting things off with an easy one, this week’s artist is U2, the song (for me) is “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” and here’s my story:

On March 9, 1987, I was a senior at Northwestern relaxing through the “study period” preceding winter-quarter exam week. I’d slept in that morning, and was walking into town (that’s Evanston, IL, for the uninitiated) just before lunchtime for my Tuesday ritual of checking out the new album releases at Vintage Vinyl. I had just descended the steps in front of Northwestern’s somewhat-famed clock tower when a black, late-model sports car pulled up in front of me and the driver yelled, “Cumshot!”

Now, only one guy had the Bush-ian temerity to nickname me “Cumshot,” or “Cumquat,” or “Cummilingous,” or choose your favorite: my friend/rival John Heilemann. John usually, but not always, got the better of me in our continual attempts to one-up each other as budding journalists, but he and I shared a giddy devotion to riding the crest of the pop-culture zeitgeist. So I walked up to the passenger window and Heilemann simply said, “Get in. I got it.”

“It,” of course, was The Joshua Tree, and Heilemann had gotten to the store first (bastard!). (more…)

For four days now, the left side of the electorate has been scratching its collective head and asking itself, “Why don’t I think this is funny?” Of course, “this” is the cover of the current issue of the New Yorker; it has inspired all manner of hand-wringing and tsk-tsking – as well as a series of progressively more desperate attempts by the man who green-lit the gag, New Yorker editor David Remnick, to scream to the masses, “Would you people just lighten up?”

One general theme of the criticism is the fear that while the cartoon clearly was intended as satire, it might be “read” as true by a certain unsavory slice of the populace. This view is summed up in a cartoon by the Washington Post’s Tom Toles:

Another suggestion, particularly among lefties, is that the New Yorker has offended its target audience because it published an image that eventually might have been dreamed up anyway – by a magazine that caters to Obama haters rather than his likely constituents. Some have noted that they wouldn’t have been surprised to see such a cartoon, stripped of any ironic context, on the cover of National Review. Cartoonist David Horsey of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has lampooned such literalism, imagining a liberal’s fantasy of how National Review could offend its own audience: (more…)

These days baby boomers, especially women, are in something of a panic. Demographically, professionally, financially and sociologically, they’ve been dominating American culture for nearly half a century now, while succeeding generations have waited, often impatiently, for them to get the hell out of the way. This summer, however, boomers confront the reality that whether they look to the left or the right, neither candidate for the highest office in our land represents their generation. One guy is old enough to be their dad’s little brother; the other guy wasn’t even out of kindergarten when Martin and Bobby were killed. Should Obama win the presidency and hold it until Generation X is fully ascendant in the political realm, the boomers’ entire presidential legacy will likely rest on the shoulders of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

I note this fact not (merely) to rub the boomers’ presidential mediocrity in their faces, but because I’m so sick to death of celebrating political and entertainment milestones that perpetuate the boomers’ vision of themselves as the most culturally significant batch of malcontents ever to walk the planet. The most recent of these is among the most egregious: last week’s release of a “30th-Anniversary Edition” of Billy Joel’s breakthrough album The Stranger. The release is timed, no doubt, to coincide with Joel’s pair of sold-out shows this week at the soon-to-be-torn-down Shea Stadium, a facility that (like Joel himself) has been sitting fat and happy on Long Island for far too long. This coalescence of events resulted in a lengthy, at-times humorous profile of Joel in the New York Times yesterday – an article whose accompanying photograph by Damon Winter revealed the full measure of Joel’s advancing age, in a manner similar to Richard Avedon’s iconic image of a dying Humphrey Bogart.

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t really have anything against The Stranger, or Joel in general, and a fresh digital remastering is almost always nice. But if The Stranger is going to be offered up as the latest boomer nostalgia trip, then let’s really think about its significance.

Jason Hare will be the first to tell you that “Just the Way You Are,” the album’s leadoff and biggest hit, is one of the touchstones of ’70s Mellow Gold; in retrospect, it stands in the memory with certain other artifacts of middle-class pop culture in 1978 – The Goodbye Girl, say, or perhaps Barry Manilow’s Even Now album – as anecdotal evidence of a generation starting to go soft. Meanwhile, “Vienna” reflects the boomers’ ’70s-era shift from changing the world to an “I’m OK, You’re OK” self-help mentality, and “The Stranger” (apart from sounding like a perfect theme song for Eyes of Laura Mars or Looking for Mr. Goodbar) seems to warn against the very emotional openness engendered by boomer trends from Flower Power to disco. (more…)

On the day we celebrated my daughter Catie’s first birthday, my good friend Robert Simonson came out to the suburbs for the party and marveled at the mountain of toys piled up on the living room rug. “Why does she need all these toys?” he asked, half rhetorically. “You know, the Shakers gave each child one doll made out of cloth, and those kids used their imaginations and made out just fine.”

In my continuing consumerist sprint to reject Robert’s admonition, last month I took Catie (now 6) to see an opening-weekend screening of Kit Kittredge: An American Girl. And what a glorious day it was! Having already dressed ourselves up and taken ourselves to a matinee of Wicked at Hollywood’s legendary Pantages Theatre, Catie and I booked across town to the Grove for the perfect nightcap to our daddy-girl culture-fest. After a leisurely and purchase-filled roam around American Girl Place, the colossal retail center of the AG empire, we crossed the street and settled into a pair of newfangled multiplex stadium-seats to take in the doll franchise’s first big-screen adventure.

Yes, it was a special time – made even more special because Felicity and Julie came along. Felicity is a proper, well-bred lass from the 1770s who believes fervently in animal rights but isn’t so sure about revolution – at least not until her father’s brash apprentice convinces her that even young ladies have a role to play in securing their rights. Julie, on the other hand, is a hippie chick from the 1970s who is mighty concerned about conservation (she saves eagles!) and the nascent women’s lib movement (she plays basketball on the boys’ team!).

Felicity and Julie are, of course, inanimate objects. Yet I know all of these biographical details about them because we’ve read the tie-in books that play such a large role in the American Girls’ runaway popularity. Up on the screen that night was the filmic story of yet another archetype, the depression-era heroine Kit – scion of the only FDR lovers in conservative Cincinnati, friend and defender of hobos, crusader for social justice in the face of police profiling. The message of Kit Kittredge is one of tolerance, of forgiveness, of judging not lest ye be judged…and, of course, of Girl Power!

In other words, Phyllis Schlafly’s worst nightmare. (more…)

sit•com n. Informal
A situation comedy; a television comedy series involving a group of regular characters in everyday situations, often set in the home and/or workplace

For three seasons, Weeds was the very model of a modern pay-cable sitcom. Set in the fictional, cookie-cutter L.A. suburb Agrestic, it centered on widowed housewife-turned-pot dealer Nancy Botwin (played by goddess of stage and screen Mary Louise Parker) and her expansive circle of friends, family and…um…business associates, from her best customer Doug (Kevin Nealon) to her ambitious supplier/grower Conrad (Romany Malco). Neatly balancing Nancy’s dual roles as suburban soccer mom and dabbler in the seedy (no pun intended) world of illicit substances, Weeds was hilarious, sexy, sometimes even moving, and always good for a contact high. It also was (seemingly) confident in the one element that must, by definition, ground any situation comedy: its situation.

Beginning with last fall’s Season-Three closer, however, Weeds has audaciously – and, so far at least, disastrously – loosed itself from its sitcom moorings. Creator Jenji Kohan didn’t just shift the show’s setting; she burned the motherfucker down, destroying all of Agrestic’s “Little Boxes” in an inferno neatly tied to last year’s horrific California wildfires. Unfortunately, while most of the major characters survived the blaze, Kohan and the show’s writers seem to have left the funny behind along with the “MILFweed” in Nancy’s growhouse; as a result, Weeds has gone sadly (and with all apologies to Cheech & Chong) up in smoke. (more…)