Wouldn’t social media be so much better if there was a Fuck You button attached to posts?
Don’t want to get out of bed and have to stare down another dreaded Monday the 13th? Well, that’s just too bad…. you have to anyway. But at least The Nest can make the ambiance of your nightmarish day just a little more tolerable…. or less tolerable depending on your taste in long forgotten muzak. Yes, it’s time for us to round up another mythological monstrosity out of that Bermuda Triangle of long lost hits we like to call the Dusty Vinyl Archive! DJ Scratchy’s got a couple of tunes on tap that are even luckier than a glue factory full of unicorns, while the Sponkies are manning the complaint line ready to issue heartfelt apologies for our shitty taste in music. Let the musical massacre commence…
The late 80’s, for all intents and purposes, may as well have not even existed for all our radios care. Many unique and talented musicians gave it their all while we were waiting for the Berlin Wall to come crumblin’ down, and we rewarded those thousand points of pop music light by burying them all under the crawlspace as soon as Nirvana burst on the scene in 1991. So little of what was dominating the FM airwaves thirty years ago lived to even see the next decade, let alone become a part of the celebrated 80’s music heritage we cherish today. If there’s one thing I’ve griped about over the years on this blog almost as much as the smartphone revolution, it’s the way we’ve completely cast this wonderful time in music history out of our collective memories…
This was a “lost hit of the 80’s” on Sirius XM last Thursday. That is just not right…
Among the many refugees sentenced to the island of misfit pop stars from the lost half of the 1980’s was a musician named Dean Esposito. Back in the day, we knew him well enough to just call him Dino. Maybe he wasn’t actually a big enough celebrity to warrant being referred to by only one name, but that’s OK. Unlike Vanilla Ice, Dino showed us that a lame looking white person actually could take on a black music genre without looking like a complete fool. If anyone out there actually does remember there was once a singer named Dino, this is probably the song they’d most associate with him. Here’s Dino’s 1989 #7 hit, “I Like It.”
Dino likes it, and I like it. Do you like it? I guess I won’t hold my breath that you do. I hadn’t thought much about this song until two years ago when it got caught up in an hour and a half loop of 37 songs that played over and over for almost two weeks straight at Meccas across the country. It took a corporate muzak radio glitch to finally give Mr. Esposito the attention he so deserved in the 21st century.
Though he’s still not the most famous Dino.
And since it’s a given I will probably never ever dedicate another post on this blog to Dino the musician… here’s a special DVA BOGO that I generally only reserve for starving late 80’s artists. Dino’s less successful, but almost as good follow up to “I Like It”… the #23 hit “Sunshine.”
Alright…. I think I’ve tortured you all enough for the start of the week. I’ll be back next Monday with another lost earworm that Dino likes…
OK, maybe I’m not quite done torturing you yet….
Evil Squirrel's Nest 
I don’t know about that, the song I most associate with the singer named Dino is Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime….
That is a pretty snazzy looking vest, though.
You mean people still remember THAT Dino? Wow, you really are sofa king old!
Ain’t that a kick in the head….
Nothing against Dino…I kinda like it. But Debbie Gibson! I had that same exact cassette…”I get lost in your eyes….” Swoon! 😛
One of my sisters left behind a half used bottle of Electric Youth perfume and it wound up in my junk collection. It’s on the shelf with my critters…
Who???
LOL! And such was the fate of almost every late 80’s pop star…
Reminds me of KC and the Sunshine band, David Lee Roth and Jim Carrey. He looks like Carrey with a wig, he is trying to imitate Roth (expressions, moves), and the song rips off ‘That’s the Way I Like It (Uh huh, uh huh)’.
I never thought of that, but you’re right! The chorus is a lot like that song. I noticed a number of commenters for the video on YouTube pointed out that he looked like Jim Carrey in a blonde wig. He does look like a douche, but I like his songs…
I remember this all too well. It got lots of play on the pop station that I was forced to listen to 8 hours a day at work. Lots and lots of play. I didn’t remember that it was Dino though. I was always confused by his name and wondered if it was Dino like Dean-o or Dino like dinosaur, which would be weird but it was the 80’s and weird was cool. Or, thought it was.
It was so hard to find out accurate information about stuff back in the days before the internet! You’d have had the answer to Dino’s name in 5 seconds if smartphones were around…
And here is the original, from 1975, the one version I like:
And I was only 7 when that came out.
Dino’s “I Like It” isn’t the same as KC’s “That’s the Way I Like It”… there are only some similarities between the choruses, thought even there it’s far from an outright sample. KC & the Sunshine Band is another one of my enigmas, because pretty much all they did was disco, and I LOVE disco…. but a lot of their songs are just alright and not great.
Well, the lack of a verse is something else, these two have in common.
I think life — overall — could be improved by an FU emoji and several other related emojis so that you could REALLY tell your story, no holding back.
Life isn’t all sunshine, lollipops and unicorns…. so for every cutesy, happy emoji there should also be a bluntly negative one to help combat all of the utter garbage there is to respond to on the internet. The Fuck You Button would be a good start….
I don’t remember this guy at all. He seemed to be a master of generic 80’s music. So I had to look him up and found this on Wikipedia: After his singing career faded, he began producing and writing songs with such artists as Tonya Mitchell, Paul Taylor, Jordan Knight, Walter Beasley, Sheena Easton, and Joanna Pacitti, the latter of whose collaborative song “Watch Me Shine” was included on the Legally Blonde motion picture soundtrack.
From me: He also did a version of Ooh Child but it wasn’t the version in Guardians of the Galaxy. His videos remind me a some comments Johnny and Tara make during the recent ice skating championships: He is moving but he could be moving to ANY music.
Hope he found some sugar mama to ease the pain while he still had his looks.
But hey, another great post. I learned something new. Thanks ES.
So many washed up musicians end up finding success writing for others. I guess it proves that songwriting talent is only a small part of being a pop star…
I join the list of “huh?” people because I honestly do not recall this guy OR this song but then so much of the music of that time sounded the same – videos looked the same – audiences rocked out the same, etc. Kind of just another bump in the road sort of stuff BUT I still like music that has that beat – it’s just so many of them sounded like clones of each other that it got lost in the fog of the 80s………..
Pam
Once Bobby Brown put New Jack Swing in the mainstream, everyone was doing it. Including people named Dino. It did get so common that it’s hard to tell who did what… but boy did they all get forgotten about later on!
Hmmm…ummm, not sure what to think. Not a particularly memorable duo of songs or the singer. Nice jacket though with a rocking’ horn section. Clearly, pop stars of the 80’s hadn’t found the fountain of youth serum for hair…Moroccan argon oil to rid themselves of that ‘mice chewed on the ends’ look on most mullets at that time. Guess we’ve come a long way baby.
Given all the hair spray that was used liberally by both sexes, it’s surprising more of that hair didn’t fall out prematurely. The mangy mullet look would have certainly killed off that popular style before its time…
Hey, don’t be dissing on Debbie…
Ah, the 80’s. Amazing stuff. I really enjoy songs with absolutely no melody whatsoever. Just a load of really hard drum bashing and people jerking sporadically.
That last bit didn’t come out right…
I wasn’t dissing Debbie! It was the satellite radio station that dared call one of her most popular songs a “lost hit!”
Drum bashing and jerking sporadically should definitely not be attempted at the same time…
I have a feeling this didn’t make it over here to the UK. Or at least, never featured on “Top of the Pops”. It doesn’t sound at all familiar to me!