On A Lighter Note

29 thoughts on “On A Lighter Note”

1. “I spent time on my hair before I came here.”

   This is one of the things I do not particularly miss about the 80’s.Report

   1. The time, or the hair?Report

      1. The attitudes toward what considered good grooming. Those folks spent hours on their hair. Perms, perms, and perms. Hairspray, mousse, and gel. Look at the makeup! Hours spent there, too.

         I like how we’re more into a minimalist thing.

         Of course, maybe people spend hours trying to look like they didn’t spend any time on themselves…Report

      2. “Hair carefully disheveled in twenty-minute ritual”Report

      3. Weren’t the late mid to late 1970s worse?Report

      4. “Weren’t the late mid to late 1970s worse?”
         No.Report

      5. @aaron-david, the Disco Era seems painfully bad aesthetically from my point of view. Some of the 1980s fashion, especially the Miami Vice influence stuff, as an Art Deco vibe to it. Most casual clothing also shed a lot of the unfortunate tendencies of the 1960s by than. The 1970s are bit way too much for me.Report

      6. @leeesq
         regarding the ’70’s, I will just leave this here:
         http://s3.amazonaws.com/cmi-niche/assets/pictures/26938/content_Debbie-Harry-Blondie_th.jpg?1378316888
         And Miami Vice is just pure deconstructed blazer evil.Report

      7. @aaron-david, I could definitely go for some of that in the 1970s. Yes, I could indeed.Report

      8. I say this entirely unironically: I would dress disco every day if I thought I could get away with it.Report

      9. “I say this entirely unironically: I would dress disco every day if I thought I could get away with it.”

         So apparently, you’re NOT so vain, and this song IS, in fact, about you?

         http://youtu.be/Naf5uJYGoiUReport

      10. Here is the story of my greatest failure in life. At every Oregon basketbal l game I tried to transform the chant Llet’s go Ducks” into “Disco Ducks.” No luck. Then they had disco night, and I thought surely, on this one night of all nights, the crowd would go nuts for a chant of Disco Ducks. No. No. Not even then. I am a failure, and all life has paled since that moment when I stood alone among 9,000 people, the only one chanting that great phrase.Report

2. Back when lip-synching a live performance was not tabloid fodder.Report

   1. If he started tearing up a picture of the Pope, we wanted to be able to switch cameras and have the viewers at home not know that anything untoward was going on.Report

   2. 2009?Report

   3. This is Top of the Pops, it’s my understanding that bad lip-synching was sort of a hallowed tradition on the show.

      Man, he’s TEENY. Looks like someone was trying to clone Prince, but accidentally got some of Richard Simmons’ DNA in there.Report

      1. Speaking of bad lip-synching and Debbie Harry:

         Report

      2. @glyph
         See my previous comment to LeeEsq.Report

      3. @aaron-david – yes, that’s why I said “speaking of”. 😉Report

      4. Video destroyed a lot of promising music careers back then. Christopher Cross, anyone?Report

      5. My love for Debbie Harry is, thankfully, unconditional.Report

   4. Back in the 1980’s, my high school and all of the other high schools in the area had lip-synch contests, complete with the various school champions competing against one another. Were we any good? I dunno, and I’m sure it would look lame in retrospect, but it was great fun while we did it.Report

      1. Ah, yes, the 8th grade talent show, me, & AC-DC’s You Shook Me All night Long.

         It was awesome, but I am so glad there is no video to haunt me, just memories of the victory.Report

3. Here’s the Jam doing A Town Called Malice on TotP. Weller was so sick of the Jam by this point that he could barely be bothered to move his lips.

   http://youtu.be/X-9Tx5NK9D8Report

   1. The irony of course being that this would end up being his high water mark. I only remember Style Council now because at the time I had a girlfriend who was a big fan…

      From the same era, the Finn brothers made all their bank off of Crowded House, but I wouldn’t be surprised if historians only associate them with Split Enz…Report

4. 1) I have obviously heard the song, but I couldn’t have told you it was Matthew Wilder who performed it if my life depended on it. I literally never heard of Wilder before.

   2) It turns out that Wilder is pretty much a one-hit-wonder, since his other “hit” only reached 33 on the chart, while the song in the video reached 5.

   3) Wilder’s birth name is Matthew Weiner, which is the same last name that Michael Savage has.Report

5. Dammit Will, I have had this thing stuck in my head all day.Report

   1. The reason I refused to open the vid.Report

      1. What has two thumbs, and is not as smart as Neil Obstat? THIS GUY.

         Just replying to this comment was enough to get it back in there. ARGHReport

Comments are closed.