You may have noticed the lack of intros to my posts lately. While this series is all about the music, I do like to do one now and again, but am going through a nice little writer’s block right now. However, there is one thing that always breaks me out of it and that’s more inappropriate ghetto music!
Yeah, I haven’t had one of those moments in a while, in fact it’s been months since Debbie Gibson blared out my car, but it happened again this past week. For those who are new to the series, let me explain. I normally drive to and from work in a route that bypasses my neighborhood ghetto. But on days where I’m picking up dinner on the way home, the row of restaurants takes me right through the slums. And lately, I’ve been taking the long way to my son’s daycare in the morning and that puts me the other way through the dingy streets, but the ghetto in daylight usually just isn’t exciting. When the lights go down it’s crack whores and homeless people (though, unlike last time I haven’t seen the homeless guy with the broken leg in a while).
The other day I was driving through the ghetto just as the sun was starting to go down. I got stuck behind a school bus that at one point must have let 20 kids off at one time. So here I am in my three-week-old Scion xB with the windows down and the iPod on shuffle. Playing as the kids got off the bus was Manowar’s “Loki God of Fire.” Strangely enough that wasn’t the inappropriate song choice. I must have been at the very end of the song because as these kids were crossing the street in front of my car, my iPod shuffles to “Soldier of Love” by Donny Osmond. At least three kids stared into my car and laughed as if to say, “You are the whitest person I have ever seen, retard.” You know, I don’t care what people think about my musical choices, but there’s something really embarrassing about a group of 13-year-olds laughing at a grown man. Of course that could have been my conscience talking as well, as those kids could have been laughing at a joke or someone could have farted. Maybe it wasn’t the Donny Osmond after all. And I mean, fuck, I’m sure they had no clue that was Donny fucking Osmond unless they are the coolest kids ever. Who am I kidding? I was a grown man being laughed at by kids for inappropriate ghetto music. Maybe I need to plan better and just always have Lil Wayne handy for these moments.
Anyway, on to a whole mess of songs that probably wouldn’t be too inappropriate. This week we begin the letter J as we take a look at the lower three-fifths of the Billboard Hot 100 chart during the 1980s.
Frank Stallone. The man has his fans — in fact, as you’ll see below, he still tours with the Frank Stallone Band, and once had a hit, “Far From Over,” that certain commenters ’round these parts profess to enjoying in an unironic way — but not even the most cogent, impassioned defense of Frank’s singing career can get around the fact that he’s the black sheep in a family that includes a promoter of women’s wrestling, a male hairdresser, and the man responsible for Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot. Or, for that matter, the fact that Frank released a country album — titled, of course, Songs From the Saddle — in 2005, the same year he appeared as a consultant on NBC’s boxing reality series, The Contender. According to his Wikipedia entry, Frank is “currently building a multi-million dollar estate in Nantucket, Massachusetts,” which is both a testament to everything wonderful about America and our latest reason for wanting to kill ourselves. 