I don't listen to commercial radio much, but I was with a friend today and he had the local "All Eighties" station on. Aside from the disturbing fact that there are now stations playing "my" music as a nostalgia format, and of course the designed-to-annoy commercials, it wasn't too bad. I enjoyed hearing some old favorites I hadn't listened to in a while. Except of course that the 1980s were almost as full of tediously lame pop music as the 2000s, and this station plays plenty of that crap. Michael Sembello's "Maniac", Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger", Deniece Williams' "Let's Hear It For The Boy", and the entire Ratt catalog were horrible even when they were new; for the love of all that's holy, let them die.

Then there are the songs that simply don't age well. Not because they wear out their welcome or sound "dated", but because you have to be young and naive (or held back intellectually) to think that they're any good. Case in point: They played "What About Me?" by Moving Pictures (a one-hit wonder from Australia who got some MTV play in the States), and the announcer follows it by saying what a "powerful" song it is. While I'm thinking, "Gosh, what a pile of self-pitying crap that song was." Back when it was new and I was still learning to drive, I thought it struck a few good chords. Which just goes to show that I was an emotionally immature whiner myself.

Since the lyrics to just about every song known to humanity have been unlawfully transcribed onto the World Wide Web, it's easy to pull them up for a little fair-use commentary:

Well there's a little boy waiting at the counter of the corner shop
He's been waiting down there, waiting half the day,
They never ever see him from the top
He gets pushed around, knocked to the ground,
He gets to his feet and he says...

CHORUS:
What about me? It isn't fair
I've had enough, now I want my share
Can't you see, I wanna live
But you just take more than you give

OK, people who "take more than they give" probably deserve to be slapped. But get over it. Why are you letting them make you miserable? Never mind the accidentally ironic phrasing of "I've had enough, now I want my share" (we get what you meant), if you're expecting that the world is just going to give it to you, you're obviously too accustomed to Mommy and Daddy taking care of you. Grown-ups get things for themselves. And they understand that they won't get everything they want. Or even what they "deserve". Because life isn't fair. Geez, that's like, Lesson One in life, kid.

Well, there's a pretty girl serving at the counter of the corner shop
She's been waiting back there, waiting for a dream,
Her dreams walk in and out, they never stop
Well, she's not too proud, to cry out loud
She runs to the street and she screams...

More of the same. Sorry, pretty girl, but "waiting for a dream" is never gonna work. Somebody read you too many "Prince Charming" fairy tales, and now you think that someone's going to come along and make your dreams come true. Well, what about him? Who's going to do all the work and fulfill his dreams? Ever think about that?

And there's another bit of unintentional irony about the boy and the girl here. The lyricist presumably did it for some parallel structure to the verses, but the girl is working at the same shop where the boy gets ignored and pushed around. She's so wrapped up in her pity party that she's contributing to his misery as well. Hey kids, you ever consider being nice to each other? Think you might make some friends that way?

Take a step back and see the little people
They might be young, but they're the ones that make the big people big

That line comes pretty damn close to being insightful... except that the "little" people it's talking about aren't the socioeconomically disadvantaged; they're just young. Yes, it's the people of the economic underclass who make it possible for the rich to be rich. But grown-ups don't gain their status on the backs of the young. If the poor disappeared, the rich would no longer be rich, but if the young disappeared, grown-ups would still be grown-ups. What "makes these big people big" (other than their actual size) is the fact that they understand that the world isn't fair, they work for the things they want, and (for the most part) they don't complain about how unhappy they are just to get attention. It feels better to blame someone else for your unhappiness, but accusing adults of being happy at the expense of their children is delusional.

I guess I'm lucky, I smile a lot
But sometimes I wish for more than I've got...

And this part just makes me want to kick the writers. You admit that you've got things pretty good. But you want it to be better (which I guess is OK), and you've got the audacity to wail about how horrible the world is to you, and to demand that it give you more. What a self-centered, taking-more-than-you-give attitude. What about you? Please shut up and grow up.

In the process of digging up these lyrics, I discovered that the winner of Australian Idol last year re-recorded this song and released it as a single which sold pretty well, proving that it's not an issue of the song being "too 80s". It's simply "too fourteen-year-old" for me to stomach.

There are songs from the 1980s that still resonate with me today, even in middle-age. Some of them are even about being young, a condition I can no longer relate to personally. (For example, Rod Stewart's "Young Turks" was on the radio half an hour earlier.) And I've heard a few new teen-angst songs in recent years that had something insightful to say. But "What About Me?" is just a load of hypocritical tripe.

Last night an old friend and I drove to Ann Arbor to see a double bill of Joe Jackson and Todd Rundgren perform at the Michigan Theater. It was pretty cool, and a fun time.

There was an opening act in addition to the two headliners, a quartet named Ethel. A string quartet: two violins, a viola, and a cello. But they rocked. Hard enough to burn through the hairs on their bows. And they fiddled as well, and they veered off into post-contemporary classical (or whatever it's called this week) compositions of their own.

Next up was Joe Jackson, the slightly younger of the two 50-something stars. He opened with a couple of his crooning tunes, and I was a bit worried, because it was clear he was having trouble with the upper range of his voice, and he was just getting started. He also fumbled a piano cascade, causing the audience to think he'd finished playing. But whether it was from warming up, or switching to his more shouty songs, his voice held out well enough for the rest of the show. He played a mixture of crowd-pleasing oldies ("Is She Really Goin' Out With Him?", "It's Different For Girls", "Steppin' Out", "Hometown") and some more recent songs from his reunion-with-the-band album Volume 4. He's had a fairly eclectic recording career, and he sampled it nicely. At one point he paused to decide which of several songs-he-didn't-write he was going to perform that night. I shouted a suggestion; he looked up from his notes and asked incredulously, "Did someone say 'Freebird'?" {wicked grin} Instead he played a couple verses from a bawdy ditty from the early 1900s.

After a brief intermission, Todd Rundgren took the stage. His recording career has been pretty diverse as well, including some pop-friendly ballads, loopy prog rock, and technological experimentation. He too indulged the audience with a few fan favorites, but couldn't bring himself to play them straight. He clearly gets tired of repetition and prefers to experiment, so he did "Can We Still Be Friends" with bossa nova syncopation (like on his fuck-with-the-listeners album With a Twist), performed "Bang on the Drum" on the ukelele, and a fairly straight rendition of "Hello, It's Me" went all jazzy toward the end. To be honest, some of his performances didn't quite work for me, such as when he used a hollow-body acoustic guitar with electric pick-ups on a rocker that really begged for a hard-edged metal sound. Still, a good show. (My friend also let me listen to Todd's latest album, which is quite good, and a return to straightforward songsmithing rather than another adventure in modern recording.)

Easily my favorite part of the show came during the encore set. First, Joe and Ethel returned to the stage to do one of his numbers. Then Todd joined them, for a cover of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" (a song he'd recorded for a George Harrison tribute album): Todd on guitar, trading off lead vocals with Joe on piano, and Ethel covering Clapton's guitar solos... the two violinists taking turns with it, and ripping their bows to shreds in the process. The sextet closed with one of Todd's tunes, which... was unfortunately a bit of a let-down after "Weeps".

I haven't been to many concerts in recent years, just a couple that I got dragged to regardless of my wishes (e.g. Van Hagar). I've gotten way past the point in my life where I'd think nothing of driving across the state to see a band, but the combination of Joe and Todd was enough to entice me to take this trip. I've seen Todd a couple times before, once when he and Utopia opened for the Tubes (in connection with POV for the former band, and Love Bomb for the latter), and about ten years ago with the same friend and my since-lost boyfriend Andy in a small venue in Grand Rapids, in which Todd did a whole set playing the keyboard... of a Macintosh computer acting as sequencer. I think I enjoyed those performances of his more than this one. But Joe didn't disappoint, Ethel was a pleasant surprise, and Todd was some nice icing on the cake.

For earlier articles on this topic, see God's ex-Boyfriend, volume one.