For most series-type items — episodes of a TV show, issues of a magazine, etc. — 100 is a great milestone that’s celebrated vigorously, as it should be. Doing something 100 times in this era of short attention spans is kind of cool. But I think it’s only appropriate that in a series of posts about songs from the ’80s, number 80 is my milestone.
That’s 20 months of songs, week after week, and with an average of 20 songs a post, a total of roughly 1,600 individual songs. And we’ve still got most of S, all of T, a decent-sized W, and the Bottom Feeders record for most songs by a single artist still to come. So tonight I think I might grab a 40 of Old E and celebrate by listening to Scott Baio’s debut album. There’s just no better way.
Here are some more songs by artists whose names start with an S, as we take a look at songs the Billboard Top 40 shunned during the Reagan era.
Michelle Shocked
“Anchorage” — 1988, #66 (download)
Michelle Shocked certainly isn’t my cup of tea, but even so, this ain’t a bad song. It was off her second album, Short Sharp Shocked, which took a little heat for the cover art: the photo of the singer being detained by police was real, but replace her with a man and you’ve virtually got the exact same cover as Chaos UK’s similarly titled Short Sharp Shock, which came out four years earlier.
I would hope that every music geek had a friend growing up like my friend John – a guy who was just as passionate about music as you were and wanted to talk about it all the time, and who absolutely, positively hated every artist you liked. John and I could talk for hours about one band after another, and most of the conversations would go like this:
In other words, it was like your basic Popdose post — except WE WERE 14! (Here at Popdose, we don’t apologize for arrested development…we advocate it.) Anyway, John had an advantage over me when it came to discovering artists he could claim as his own: Every summer he would go visit his extended family in Puerto Rico, where the radio stations seemed to revel in turning fringe-dwelling AOR acts into local chart-toppers. By the time we finished high school the list would grow to include Duke Jupiter, Saga, Glass Moon, the Monroes — and on and on. (Heck, Glass Moon even got 