No way, dude! Take that back!
We’re at that midway point on our journey across the current row on your calendar, and that means it must be Wednesday! So let’s bring out our best negative vibes and smack another shitty classic upside the head on The Nest’s Top 30 Iconic Songs I Can’t Stand countdown! We’re getting oh so close to the Bott… er, Top 10, and it’s starting to rot my eardrums out just searching for these lousy ass songs on YouTube to put in the posts. Well, thankfully I have ponies to do the dirty work for me so I can spend more of my time writing up thoroughly non-clever and unwitty insults for garbage such as this….
#12. “1985” – Bowling For Soup
If there is anything my longtime followers should know about me, other than the fact that I like critters and am a fucked up mess, it is that I grew up in and absolutely adore the nostalgia of the 1980’s. Probably well over 90% of the music I feature here on Mondays came from that decade. I used to have a Flashback Friday series that covered quite a few old memories of 80’s fads and pop culture. The good old days weren’t always good, but the 80’s were fucking awesome…
Back when CGI actually looked like CGI…
A little over ten years ago, someone from my old internet home introduced me to a then-current pop song that was seemingly made for me because it was so totally 80’s. All of a sudden, my decade didn’t seem as cool as I thought it was…
Like every other group of people who have ever existed, those who lived through and came of age in the 1980’s have been reduced to an unintentionally unflattering stereotype. And as is often the case which these kind of generalizations, the more different individual pieces that get added to the puzzle, the more ridiculous and impossible the overall picture becomes. To demonstrate what I mean, let’s take a gander at “1985’s” lyrics…
Hey! This song was originally written by SR-71! Whoever the hell they are…
She was gonna be an actress
She was gonna be a star
She was gonna shake her ass
On the hood of Whitesnake’s car
Well, really, who wouldn’t want to?
Bruce Springsteen, Madonna
Way before Nirvana
Whoa! Hold up a minute there, Soup Guys! Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again,” referenced to in an earlier verse, was from 1987. Nirvana broke out in 1991. That’s only four years later… I wouldn’t say this lady is preoccupied with a time “way before Nirvana”…
Seems like ages ago, man!
There was U2 and Blondie
And music still on MTV
Dafuq!?!? Blondie’s last year of 80’s relevance was in 1981…. a full SIX YEARS before our Whitesnake reference (Not to mention four years before the title year of the song)! Blondie’s way before Whitesnake is greater than Whitesnake’s way before Nirvana! No wonder our protagonist is having mental issues… she can’t even keep track of fucking time periods correctly.
The only two people actually preoccupied with 1985.
And who’s the other guy
That’s singing in Van Halen
Unless this is an obscure reference to the very short-lived Gary Cherone era in the late 90’s, this almost has to be talking about Sammy Hagar taking over for the uber popular David Lee Roth as Van Halen’s lead singer after the former embarked on a solo career in…….. you guessed it, 1985! How can someone who watched enough MTV to fantasize about taking Tawny Kitawn’s place atop David Coverdale’s car in 1987 not be aware that one of the biggest rock bands of the decade set off with a new lead singer in 1986!?!? Good music can overcome shitty lyrics (Not that “1985’s” music is very good to begin with), but horrendous attention to detail like this takes me out of the song and bothers the fuck out of me…
And quite frankly, this bothers the fuck out of me too.
The pathetic collection of mismatched references in this song are a product of our wanting to categorize nostalgia strictly by decade. It’s why people can think Nirvana came along long after hair metal… yet freely associate said genre with a band that was actually popular in the waning days of the disco era. A giant chain link fence with razor wire has been erected at midnight of every January 1, 19×0 in the 20th century… and nothing is allowed to pass or associate with any trend or event located on the other side. And that insane way of thinking about the past only gets worse the farther you move the farther you move the timeline from an era… where centuries, rather than decades, become the guideposts… and since nobody (other than Keith Richards) is still alive from those times, the historical accuracy of those long ago eras is extremely suspect. This is why you commonly see Dark Ages themes at fairs that are supposedly supposed to be about the Renaissance…
Gotta love those free thinkers of the Enlightenment…
I’ll return next Wednesday with the song that was just good enough to not make the Top 10….
Evil Squirrel's Nest 
Dude….why you have to do this to me? If you cut me, do I not bleed? (Should I have saved that for Every Rose Has Its Thorn?).
I had a really hard time giving you a like on this, but I did it for Debbie…..
Better to burn it now since I snubbed Poison from the countdown (And I can’t stand that song, but not in a Top 30 way)…
Never heard that song before, and it is — meh – but I liked the vid.
The video is nice if you can tune out the creepy looking fat dude…
Hey, he is the star of the video! The ironic touch.
This song irks me so bad.
It fucking sucks!
Never heard the song before but that video is hilarious. Loved all the “versions” of the garage band but most especially for some wacky reason the play on Robert Palmer’s “girl band” backup from “Addicted To Love”…….HAHAHAHAHA
Pam
That was……. very special indeed. I had never seen the video for it before, and was expecting it to be terrible… but it wasn’t bad at all. Those “girls” though….
ody N biskit…..de song N band we due knot noe; will hafta give it a listen when de FSG getz home
but ther videe oh iz flippin hill larry uz !! 🙂 🙂 ♥♥
Yeah, the video kinda makes up for the lame song…
If you have to make a snarky forgetful reference to Sammy Hagar you ain’t worth shit.
This song is so annoying. What a bunch of losers. Good choice ES.
Sammy Hagar is a god where I live. We would make snarky references to the guy he replaced….
I’d forgotten all about this song. It always annoyed the hell out of me!
19… 19…. 19 shut the fuck up guys! Man, they made the 80’s seem so awful…
don’t throw tomatoes (or nuts) at me but I like that song ;O))))
Someone has to stand up for it. Besides, I don’t think I can throw tomatoes or nuts quite that far!
Ding-ding-ding!! We have a winner!! We have heard of this song. It’s okay. It’s neither great to us or bad to us. It’s magenta. Shrugs piggy back. We could always say it has a great beat Dick. You can dance to it. Snorts and rolls with piggy laughter. XOXO – Bacon
Magenta is a music ranking now? What about mauve and henna…
It’s sort of bouncy and catchy, but I totally agree with your analysis of the lyrics.
I’m now going to have to make sure I listen to something else though to stop it becoming an earworm….
Those lyrics just completely ruin it for me. I thought maybe the problem was the band was too young to have even lived through the 80’s, but they’re largely the same age as me, and a few even older. They have no excuse for their inaccuracies…
You make me glad I’ve never heard this song (though the picture of the guy in the kiddie pool had me laughing out loud). Keep it up – these are always a fun read.
That dude in the pool is something else…
I’m with you!
Hopefully on the song being terrible and not hating the 80’s!
Never heard of it and I’m very grateful of that! Thank you for NOT Sharing please!!
Well, I did share it, you just chose to pretend I didn’t share it!
LOL !!
I like this one and I like this band. They crack me up (historical inaccuracies aside). Their best (and funniest, in my opinion) tune, however, is “Girl All The Bad Guys Want”. Funny stuff. Besides, how can ya hate a band that did the “Jimmy Neutron” theme?
I thought the video was quite clever, doing all the bands in the garage. Though I can never unsee the Robert Palmer bit…
No wonder I rarely comprehend lyrics or most of the MTV videos.
This is one of the greatest songs of all time, written and sung by one of the greatest bands of all time. And they put on one hell of a live show.
LOL! I was almost hoping you wouldn’t see this post!
LOL! I bet you were. 😎
Last night we got to talking about the 1980s again. My lost decade, as it were. I pointed out that we did have pop music in Israel. Euro-pop. It wasn’t R&R and it was definitely NOT American. Some of it was interesting and a lot of it was fun … entertaining … and it came in a LOT of languages. I don’t think Israel even began to catch up with American music until the late 1990s and I’m not sure that their version of it has anything to do with ours. Our stars don’t mean anything to them. They know English and French and German stars, though. Just not ours. They are VERY up on our 1950s and 1960s stars, but started to lose it in the 1970s. So I can’t really respond to these posts very well. i can “like” them because they are interesting in an historical way, but I don’t relate to them at all. Garry doesn’t either because he didn’t listen to this music, even though he WAS here. He got stuck in the 1950s and never really moved on until Credence Clearwater. Go figure, right?