Skepticlawyer

Ages ago, Tim Watts tagged me for this exercise in owning up.

This time it’s the five most embarrassing musical moments that still happen to be on one’s iPod (I do recommend Tim’s version, too – he has some real toe-curlers). I’m older than Tim, so I’ve had a few extra years to accumulate music that others may find deeply worrying. This takes in, of course, the entire decade of the 1980s. That said, the 1980s is in the process of musical rehabilitation, so maybe some of this stuff will make a comeback…

For reasons that remain obscure, my first pick – the Hooters‘ (a band, not the restaurant chain) ‘All You Zombies‘ has embedding disabled in all versions on YouTube, so you’ll just have to click through if you want to watch it. I still don’t get the clip, but that apart, it’s worth watching for some truly spectacular 80s mullets. This one gets broken out when I’m tripping off down memory lane.

Collective Soul’s Shine was on the way out anyway as grunge faded, but it became social death to play in public once it was revealed as Virginia Tech campus killer’s Cho Seng Hui’s (obsessively) favourite song, one he played constantly (to the irritation of his dorm-mates). He even wrote the words up in various public places.

Next up is another step back into the 80s, and one where once again YouTube have disabled embedding (I suspect SonyBMG may have something to do with this). It’s the Eurythmics’ SexCrime, part of the soundtrack to the (very bad) film version of Orwell’s 1984. Maybe Orwell would translate to the screen more effectively in these days of perpetual war, security scares and surveillance. It just didn’t work in the 80s, the decade when it became clear that Marxism and the obsessive control freakery that goes with it was a dead duck. I suppose people everywhere made the mistake of thinking that peace was breaking out all over the globe.

On the subject of end-of-totalitarianism optimism, it’s hard to beat the Scorpions’ Wind of Change (complete with Wall Coming Down footage), now severely dated and only played for memory lane purposes. My the late 80s were heady times.

I’ve always thought my last guilty pleasure – Limp Bizkit’s Rollin (Air Raid Vehicle) beautifully symbolized the last gasp for a certain type of American power. Filmed in (and on) the World Trade Centre towers and featuring a set of female backing dancers guaranteed to drive an Islamist out of his tree (they’re not so much sexy as powerful), the World Trade Centre administration thanked the band for featuring the towers so positively; lead singer Fred Durst received the official letter on September 12, 2001. Immensely popular at the time, the song has come to be seen as rather gauche (and in some respects presaged Limp Bizkit’s rapid decline into self-parody).

I’m completely useless at figuring out who else to tag in these things, so I’ll invite readers to share their guilty iPod pleasures in the comments. If you get caught in the spaminator, don’t fear – one of us can fish you out.