Buddy Revel, the seemingly unstoppable juggernaut of a bully in Three O’Clock High (1987), isn’t actually a bully. Bullying is a tool used to establish or enforce social dominance. And Buddy isn’t the slightest bit interested in the social dynamic at Weaver High School. As he clearly states to Jerry Mitchell (Casey Siemaszko) when the hapless young journalist attempts to engage him while they stand in front of a row of urinals, Buddy doesn’t want anybody to know anything about him. The enigmatic and elusive science fiction writer John Steakley wrote “Bullies don’t want to fight you. They don’t want to fight at all. They just want to beat you up.” And the exact opposite is true of Buddy Revel. He has countless chances to beat Jerry up. But he’s not interested in beating Jerry up. All he wants to do is fight him.
As it turns out, Buddy is more like the monster in a horror movie. He seemingly has the ability to be everywhere at once. Traditional authority figures are incapable of stopping him. And except for a moment of greed at the very end of the film, he seems to be motivated by nothing more than pure malice. He’s more of a caricature of a bully than an actual bully, which is absolutely necessary for the story to unfold as it does.
Why is gold valuable? Why is it worth anything at all? Sure, it’s yellow and shiny. But so is brass. It’s scarce, but so is osmium, and you don’t see anybody making jewelry out of that (actually, osmium is kind of poisonous, which is why it’s rarely used, and in those cases only as an alloy). Gold has got a low melting point and is very malleable, which makes it nicely workable, but also means it’s easy to scratch or dent. And it’s pretty damned cumbersome, too. So what’s so great about gold?
Actually, what really makes gold so great is its resistance to corrosion. It’s virtually impossible to dissolve, and doesn’t oxidize easily – meaning that it won’t rust, tarnish, or become discolored under normal circumstances. Remember the old redox potential tables from your high school chemistry? Gold is right up there near the top. Gold doesn’t get old. Sunken treasure can languish at the bottom of the ocean for centuries without losing its luster. Platinum has the same characteristics – except it’s more rare, and hence more valuable.
It all started back in September, when Robert Cass sent an e-mail to the staff telling us Billboard had announced that Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” is the top song of the Hot 100 era. The reactions were swift and predictably shocked, ranging from “There must not be a God” to “That is one brutal list” to “Just as a general rule, I don’t think an artist is allowed to complain about a lack of respect once they’ve recorded a duet with the Fat Boys.” And just as swiftly, an idea was born: what if we all ranked our favorite songs of the era and shared the results with all of you?
So here it is — the Popdose 100. We limited our choices to songs from the last 50 years, and in the interest of establishing some kind of consensus, we tried to stick to singles that actually charted on the Hot 100. Some of us limited the number of times we could pick a single by any particular artist, but for the most part we kept it as informal as possible — and wouldn’t you know it, “The Twist” is nowhere to be found.
Now, this being the Internet and all, we know two things: 1) people love lists; and 2) they love to complain about what’s on them. So we expect a fair amount of grousing about what made our list; hell, even some of the writers who participated were a little perturbed by the final results. Where’s all the rap? Where the hell are the women? So on and so forth. Every list is flawed, and ours is no exception, but remember, this isn’t meant to be a list of the “best” or “top” singles of the era — only our favorites.
Now that we’ve gotten all the background info and caveats out of the way, thanks are in order: to David Medsker, for tabulating the results; to Robert Cass, for editing it into something legible; and to the Popdose staff — not to mention our friends Peter Lubin, Amy Davis, Carl Abernathy, and Mike Heyliger, who added their votes to our own. Let’s take a look at the results, shall we?
A few years ago, my dad took a vacation to Hawaii. While he was there, he tried surfing for the first time. Even though he’s a good athlete, and solid swimmer (a former lifeguard), he didn’t have much luck. As he explained it, he was able to get to his knees, but couldn’t progress upwards from there and stand up without losing his balance. During the few times that I’ve tried to give people surfing lessons, kneeling on the board is one of the mistakes I strongly caution beginners against (the other is to never, ever, ever let the board get between you and an incoming wave). It’s an understandable habit for anyone to develop – it makes sense to progress from your stomach to your knees – but I think members of my father’s generation are much more susceptible to this tendency, due to a fundamental difference in the way they approach athletics in general.
Stacey Peralta’s documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001) contains a few very important pieces of information that help explain the evolution of modern skateboarding. Chief among these is the illustration of the relationship between skateboarding and surfing, and how early skateboarders were attempting to imitate maneuvers that were performed in the water (something that is fascinating to me personally is how a reverse has taken place and now surfers often try to emulate maneuvers that were originally invented on skateboards). Equally important is the documentation of how a severe drought in the mid-seventies in Southern California led to the evolution of vertical skateboarding. And of course, the film pays a great deal of attention to the lifestyle that was associated with the early days of skateboarding, particularly amongst the original members of the Zephyr skateboarding team from Santa Monica. But something that the film isn’t quite bold enough to assert, but I think can be fairly argued, is that the physical orientation of a person riding a board – the very stance itself – served as a line of demarcation between generations. (more…)
DwDunphy: It almost seems unfair that Peter Schilling’s “Major Tom” should go up against David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” “Major Tom” is a pleasant enough piece of ’80s fiddle-dee-dee, but come on! Let’s review the facts here. First, Bowie’s song is about an astronaut as metaphor for a smack junkie. Schilling’s song is about an astronaut. Sure, it’s an astronaut lost in space, but so what? All kinds of crap gets lost out there. Second, Bowie is starting to get his freak on as this song arrived just before the Ziggy Stardust juggernaut. Schilling’s delivery makes Kraftwerk sound like Disco Tex and the Sexolettes. Third, Schilling’s keys sound like a Casio on sale at Wal-Mart. “Space Oddity’s” mellotron part? Rick goddamn Wakeman.
Zack: Sheesh, you aren’t going to make this easy, are you? Obviously there would be no Schilling song without Bowie’s original concept (or would there? The story of Major Tom bears a surprising similarity to the plot of the Asimov short story “Does a Bee Care?”), and “Major Tom (Coming Home)” only reached #14 on the American singles chart. That’s way worse than “Space Oddity,” right? Actually, no, it’s not. Even after Bowie’s record label attempted to buoy “Space Oddity’s” popularity by releasing it to coincide with the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, the original release, failed to chart in the U.S. Yeah, but who cares about the U.S.? How much did the hometown fans in the U.K. like it? The original version only reached #5 in the U.K. It wasn’t until 1975, six years later, that a third release of Bowie’s song managed to reach the top of his home market, something that Schilling accomplished in about six minutes when he released “Major Tom” in 1980 in his native Germany.
I’ll start with the negative: seeing a Vampire Weekend show made me feel old.
And that’s really the only thing I found disappointing about the show. I’m not one to focus on the negative, but I also won’t go out of my way to defend the performances of bands whose music I like if they happen to suck it up on stage. There were a few things to criticize about this show, most notably the technical issues that plagued the band, but I ended up quite impressed Vampire Weekend, in spite of the mega-hype that’s always impossible to live up to, and in spite of feeling like a crotchety old geezer by the end of their performance.
The Wiltern has been host to some good times for me. My favorite show of 2007 took place there – The National – and at the latest Explosions in the Sky concert I was fortunate enough to encounter the Friday Night Lights goddess Minka Kelly. The pounded brass decorations that line the roof and walls of the theater give it a vaguely Egyptian feeling, the lighting and acoustics are reliably good, and it’s surprisingly easy to get to, especially if you’re willing to ride the bus or the Metro subway.
We arrived just in time to hear the last song of the first opening act, Abe Vigoda, and from what I heard they sounded just awful. They were followed by Oh Look at Us We’re So Experimental (my bad, they’re actually called White Williams), a happy hardcore dream power-pop clockgazer band fronted by Cleveland-based Joe Williams. Their music sort of felt like it belonged at a rave, in that it had the capacity to become tiresome very quickly. It wasn’t necessarily bad, but it didn’t really put me in the mood to do anything – dance, drink, sleep, do drugs, nothing. For such uninspiring music, it just seemed like a massively overwrought performance – like an auditory version of Spirograph. (more…)
There are fewer members of the Washington establishment that I detest more than Richard “Dickface” Cohen. I noticed yesterday evening that he’s finally soured on his hero John McCain, but I’m willing to predict that within a few weeks he’ll have decided that McCain has somehow regained his honor, and that Obama has committed some unforgivable transgression of campaigning, and at this point Cohen will happily resume shilling for the Arizona senator. Cohen is as much of a turncoat liberal as Joe Lieberman, and soon enough he’ll return, tail between his legs, to genuflect at the altar of power.
One of the most sickening episodes during the Bush administration, one that betrayed so many members of the Washington press as nothing more than sycophantic lapdogs for the establishment power structure, was the conviction of Scooter Libby and the commutation of his sentence by President Bush. Among the litany of abuses of the basic principles of both democracy and constitutional government, this was the one example that stood out to me as an unmistakable signal that our system of representational government, as articulated in the Constitution, was in dire jeopardy.
I’ve seen a number of lists of questions that the press should theoretically be asking Sarah Palin, if they ever get a chance to query her outside of a very strictly controlled setting (such as Charles Gibson’s interview, which was surprisingly adversarial). But I’ve got one question that’s been bugging me that I’d really like to see someone ask John McCain: “Did you think it was appropriate for the President to commute the sentence of convicted perjurer Scooter Libby, and would you have done the same thing?”
This past weekend I was the best man at my friend Rodger’s wedding. I spent a long time working on my toast, which went well, but there was something I was thinking about that I didn’t get to include in my speech.
A lot of times, our ability to feel joy for others is constrained by our own status – if you’re having a horrible month, it’s hard to be happy when you find out that one of your friends just scored a huge raise. That’s why it’s a bad idea to gamble as a group – for every person that hits it big, there’s going to be at least one other who takes a bath. But what’s always been interesting about my friendship with Rodger is that I’m always rooting for him – regardless of what’s going on with me. I can spend two hours bobbing about in freezing water without catching a single wave, but if I see Rodger pick up a long right and stroll out onto the nose, I’ll be hooting for him as loud as I can.
I’ve always tried to resist being jealous about having friends chase after my ex-girlfriends, but Rodger’s the one guy I was actually disappointed in when he passed up his chance when my ex Suzon turned up at his New Year’s party in a pair of tight leather pants.* Doug Liman’s independent film Swingers (1996) features a similar sort of friendship between its central character Mikey (Jon Favreau) and his libertine friend Trent (Vince Vaughn).
In Mike Judge’s 1999 comedy Office Space, its protagonist Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston) is described by the downsizing consultants as a “straight shooter with upper management written all over him.” It’s a gross misjudgment on the part of the consultants, as Peter’s casual demeanor charmed them much the way that George W. Bush was able to charm almost half the voters of the United States of America the following year. Peter’s boss, the endlessly imitated Bill Lumbergh (Gary Cole), is a lousy manager himself, but he’s driven by enough of a sense of self-preservation to disagree with them, explaining that Peter isn’t the caliber of person they want in upper management, and that “he’s also been having some problems with his TPS reports.”
Satire is Mike Judge’s strongest suit, and the disintegration of American society into various facets of stupidity is a topic he confronted more broadly in his following film, Idiocracy (2006). But the focus in Office Space was much sharper, where work life in general was the target, but the workplace managers came under the heaviest fire. Playing a cameo as the manager of Chotchkie’s, Mike Judge himself is willing to step in as the target of ridicule, repeatedly castigating Peter’s girlfriend Joanna (Jennifer Aniston) for her insistence on wearing the minimum number of pieces of flair. It’s meaningless minutiae such as this that are clearly a source of such exasperation for Judge; cover sheets on TPS reports and pieces of flair are not important to how a business functions, and are a waste of time for management to concern themselves with.
Zack: It’s hard to argue that there’s anybody who has a better grasp of teen angst than Gordon Gano of the Violent Femmes. But Brian Molko of Placebo comes close. Growing up as a theater-obsessed, androgynous (and eventually bisexual) child in a family that rarely spent more than two years in a single location, I guarantee the only thing Molko dreaded more than having to interact with his dad, an international banker, was going to school. In an FHM interview, Molko claimed to have been forced to leave his school in Luxembourg due to excessive bullying, and given his nature and appearance, is it hard to doubt? And what does M83’s Anthony Gonzalez have to say about his life as an adolescent? “I loved being a teenager. That’s when I discovered music and started to take drugs and make parties [sic] with my friends. I really started to discover new things. Nowadays I would like to be a teenager again.” Wow. Someone get this poor guy a rag so he can wipe off all the angst.
Buddy Revel, the seemingly unstoppable juggernaut of a bully in Three O’Clock High (1987), isn’t actually a bully. Bullying is a tool used to establish or enforce social dominance. And Buddy isn’t the slightest bit interested in the social dynamic at Weaver High School. As he clearly states to Jerry Mitchell (Casey Siemaszko) when the hapless young journalist attempts to engage him while they stand in front of a row of urinals, Buddy doesn’t want anybody to know anything about him. The enigmatic and elusive science fiction writer John Steakley wrote “Bullies don’t want to fight you. They don’t want to fight at all. They just want to beat you up.” And the exact opposite is true of Buddy Revel. He has countless chances to beat Jerry up. But he’s not interested in beating Jerry up. All he wants to do is fight him.
Why is gold valuable? Why is it worth anything at all? Sure, it’s yellow and shiny. But so is brass. It’s scarce, but so is osmium, and you don’t see anybody making jewelry out of that (actually, osmium is kind of poisonous, which is why it’s rarely used, and in those cases only as an alloy). Gold has got a low melting point and is very malleable, which makes it nicely workable, but also means it’s easy to scratch or dent. And it’s pretty damned cumbersome, too. So what’s so great about gold?
A few years ago, my dad took a vacation to Hawaii. While he was there, he tried surfing for the first time. Even though he’s a good athlete, and solid swimmer (a former lifeguard), he didn’t have much luck. As he explained it, he was able to get to his knees, but couldn’t progress upwards from there and stand up without losing his balance. During the few times that I’ve tried to give people surfing lessons, kneeling on the board is one of the mistakes I strongly caution beginners against (the other is to never, ever, ever let the board get between you and an incoming wave). It’s an understandable habit for anyone to develop – it makes sense to progress from your stomach to your knees – but I think members of my father’s generation are much more susceptible to this tendency, due to a fundamental difference in the way they approach athletics in general.
There are fewer members of the Washington establishment that I detest more than Richard “Dickface” Cohen. I noticed yesterday evening that he’s finally 
This past weekend I was the best man at my friend Rodger’s wedding. I spent a long time working on my toast, which went well, but there was something I was thinking about that I didn’t get to include in my speech.
In Mike Judge’s 1999 comedy Office Space, its protagonist Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston) is described by the downsizing consultants as a “straight shooter with upper management written all over him.” It’s a gross misjudgment on the part of the consultants, as Peter’s casual demeanor charmed them much the way that George W. Bush was able to charm almost half the voters of the United States of America the following year. Peter’s boss, the endlessly imitated Bill Lumbergh (Gary Cole), is a lousy manager himself, but he’s driven by enough of a sense of self-preservation to disagree with them, explaining that Peter isn’t the caliber of person they want in upper management, and that “he’s also been having some problems with his TPS reports.”
