Pour Some Sugar On Me

by Crom

When most of us think about the 80’s, and more specifically 80’s pop culture, we generally shudder. Horrific visions of David Coverdale crawling up your leg with a knife in his teeth, plague your nightmares, and D Snider’s voice echoing in your head “SMF!”

Most people just assumed we the human race, had gone a little crazy and a lot of the popular music and videos were the result of offshoot style bled from the 70’s and retailored by a generation attempting to define themselves with better music and style then the previous two decades. Unfortunately, they failed to realize that the 70’s had to die for a reason, and rehashing any of it regardless of how small a part of it was mixed into the popular style of the time, was a bad idea.

However, don’t take this as me simply shitting on the 80’s, it had it’s fair share of good things: Back to the Future, Gi Joe, Transformers, Indiana Jones… you get the idea, but there was also a vast reservoir of total crap. I tell you here and now, that crap had to exist.

The incredible wave of “shite” that wiggled its way onto the world stage like so much leaky sewage was in essence the boot camp for all the youth of that generation. It was the training ground. Under the steady tutelage of poorly build rhyme and scansion, coupled with wretched clothing and unkempt hair, we the young people were prepared for the worst period of musical and creative history. The past 10 years.

Whatever misconceptions you hold about the 80’s having bad music, you don’t know shit. The past ten years there has been a war going on people. A war without bullets, or artillery; a war for record sales. The casualties of this war have been piling up and there appears to be no end in sight.

Ever since the Backstreet boys and their kind surfaced in the music world, there’s been an obvious pattern to new musical groups coming out. Let me digress for a moment, the Backstreet Boys were tried in the 80’s (New Kids on the Block) but it was obviously not the right time for 5 man pretty boys, they crashed and burned faster then a hydrogen balloon in a napalm factory, but the last 7 years they’ve been cropping up faster then hydroponic labs in Vancouver.

Take another example: Pop diva’s Alannis Morisette came onto the scene and now there’s an almost unending line up of female vocalist’s. Sadly half of the female vocalist’s aren’t even singing different music from each other, and for the most part are popular based only on their appeal to a demographic that will drastically change in the next 2 years and most likely hate them. Aiming songs about how your life is changing and trying to discover yourself, at impressionable teenage girls is like preaching celibacy to a Eunuch.

Let me get back to the heart of what I was trying to say. The music of the 80’s had more then it’s fair share of total cheese masters and synthed-out trash bands, it wasn’t taken very seriously though, and that gave us the power to recognize the crap from the cream. This was critical in preparing us for the Gong Show that filled up the airways for the last 10 years with the likes of Britney Spears and Ricky Martin (to name a few of the recent horrifying “talents”) because it gave us the shrewd perspicacity to sift through the garbage and arrive at that which is relevant.

So the next time you’re listening to the radio and King Diamond starts playing, pause before smashing your foot through the deck and remember this: They took one for the team.

Crom