Pajiba

I'm a sucker for stuff like this. Not all music has to be exceptionally good for me to like it. Mediocre - yet fun - stuff does it for me, too. There's nothing better than singing along to bad songs with your friends.

Growing up in Miami the only thing I know about the 80's music scene is that it consisted of Phil Collins and all the music from Miami Vice. God I miss those days the women, the Cuban/Jamaican/Haitian food, and the dope, my goodness, the dope.

Isn't it "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" and not "Every Rose Has It's Thorn", which would be "Every Rose Has It Is Thorn"?

Unitedstatians...

A musical of 80s power ballads sounds oddly amusing. A full length feature film sounds horrifying.

*sigh* Ok, Pajiba, you got me. I love stupid Journey. And I had, by the way, quite the crush on Steve Perry in the 80s. (To be fair, though, at 13 my hormones were not particularly discriminatory. Actually, now I think about it, at 38 my hormones are not particularly discriminatory, either. Go figure.) I have the greatest hits album in my car right now, which is mostly Esc4p3 and some Frontiers. Which includes this song. Which I love.

I'll see myself out.

P.S. PaddyDog, I was 17 when Reagan was elected. In spite of the fact that I loved Duran Duran and Journey, I would still not have voted for him. Just so you know.

P.P.S. I loved that stupid Kajagoogoo song too. Dammit! I just keep getting less cool here, don't I...

I was listening to all of them, Paddy. And Split Enz, Haircut 100, Squeeze, New Order, Camouflage, Psych Furs...

AnnaVonB:

You have left me with no alternative. I'm arranging an intervention. Will 2pm work?

Cindy:

You with me?

The Cutoff Sleeves of Justice!...Steve Perry and Bass-Guy's-Moustache: I salute you.

HA! Tammy, you just killed me. As did branded:
Well, except for "Dancing on the Ceiling," obviously.

I don't know - I have a hard time savaging these bands given the utter crap that popular music is today. I know there's a lot of talent out there, but there are few songs on the airwaves that involve a singer along with a few people who can actually play instruments. I know that's a pathetically low bar to set, but most commercially popular artists (at least those as commercially successful as Journey et al. were) today don't meet it.

Does one "throw" an intervention, sort of like a baby shower?

Any time I heard Steve Perry's name, I think of Baseketball.

As for this steaming pile, I didn't like it when it was called "Moulin Rouge", I refused to finish watching it when it was called "Across The Universe", and I'll be damned if I'm going to even think of looking in its direction when it's called "Rock of Ages". You don't name a crappy musical after a "romantic" reality show with a washed up rocker! You're just inviting epic failure!

I'd segway into a new movie idea, but those are probably getting old by now.

The 80s was such a time of music extremes, there was no blend from genre to genre like there is now. A music identity was as plain as the clothes you wore and it was hard to cross over.

I never bought Thriller or any Madonna or Duran Duran, for me it was a time for Iron Maiden, Judas Priest and Ronnie James Dio, none could be mistaken for a hair band. It wasn't until about 1985 when I had a mature enough ear for REM and the Replacements to go in tandem with the above stated groups.

But within three weeks in 1982, I did see a Neil Diamond concert and seperate shows of Asia and Cheap Trick.

Damn to not being able to watch videos at work. Let me just say to the haters:
Some day love will find you!
Break those chains that bind you!

So is this a "Rent" for straight people? Or is it like the Queen musical with shittier music and NOT in the future? Because everything is better set in the future...with AIDS.

I followed richmac's progression. Teen/college I was huge for Priest, Ted Nugent, Rush, Styx, Kansas and the like. And yes, I got the Scorpions ref in the title up there. One of the great moments of my young life was a Def Leppard/Scorpions/Judas Priest show at a theater in Pittsburgh.

Then ... one day, coming across a distant radio station in my car in rural SW Virginia, I heard Husker Du. My life changed forever and I've seldom gone back.

I must confess, though: Last summer we went to one of those baseball game/concert with fireworks deals at PNC Park with ... REO Speedwagon. And (ulp!) it was a hell of a show for what it was.

Oh, PajibaGods, can we please have a "Shitty Music Video Flashback of the Week" feature here on Pajiba?
YouTube and the like are full of gems such as the above, and today's youth never really SEE music videos anymore, and are so deprived of the glorious rapture a truly shitty video debacle can bestow.

Godtopus, rain your craptacular videos down upon us! Your subjects crave more bad hair and overwrought lip-syncing!

Jay - all good points. One had to work much harder back in the day to get access to The Cure, The Smiths et al. I remember waiting at our shitty local record store (Strawberry's, anybody?) for new Morrissey tapes. That's love, my friends.

Ooh, pre-90s Anthrax. Nice. And let's not forget Dead Milkmen and Skinny Puppy, while we're at it.

Haha, I also loved Def Leppard, Jay. My dad drove me & my friend to see them in '86(?) at Meadowlands, back when it was still called Brendan Byrne Arena and not Corporate Logo Advertisement Arena. Evidently they had a "parents' lounge" area. He brought a book. At some point, he got up to take a walk and found some area where the band was going to walk through between backstage and after party or whatever, and he brought us over there after the show. It was pretty much the highlight of my 15 year old life. Aw, my dad.

Since TK referenced the Scorpions in the title, I'm compelled to inform everyone that any discussion about power ballads begins and ends with Still Loving You. Behold the greatness of Klaus Meine:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uNyPefjS88

Journey ROCKS. Who doesn't enjoy turning it all the way up and rocking out in your car when it comes on the radio?

I'm a big fan of bad 80's music. But mostly just hearing it on the radio and dancing around like a fool. I don't actually have much and I would certainly never spend actual money on it.

Well, EricD, youtube is blocked at my office, so I can't post a link. But I'll tell you this: I'm never gonna give you up. Or let you down. Or run around and desert you.

What a coincidence, I also love Rick Astley's video!

The video is bad--surprisingly so, and far worse than I remembered, and I've always remembered it as epically bad, given that the song itself is one of the greatest examples of over-emotive overreach in pop history. It's bad-opera bad--if you just listened to it and you didn't understand English, you'd think he was singing about the final defeat of Elvis and an army of our mothers at the Battle of Evermore by the forces of Satan, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and the '77 Dallas Cowboys, directed by Paul Haggis, with a grim denouement of child slavery and pet rape thrown in. Go back and listen to Steve Perry's anguished cries for mercy and vengeance at the end, as the searing keyboard cauterizes the bleeding wounds of his soul, and the guitars crush dumptrucks. Love dies, and we all must learn this, but Steve Perry has taken all of our pain into himself. Look upon him, there in his sleeveless t-shirt, and know the shame of unworthiness.

And then they undercut the power of this awesome, AWESOME song by looking like a bar-band goofing around on the docks--and then they undercut THAT by juxtaposing the wacky air-band stuff with the "this song MEANS something, man" eye contact and the zonked-out, "she's got the beat" girl wandering around to make it conceptual. It makes you wonder how rock videos ever caught on at all.

But what's weird, looking back from 2008, is the fact that they look like adults. And not nostalgia-circuit old guys (which is where all the hair bands are now)--they were grown-ups making contemporary, *popular* pop-rock music. That's a demographic that's gone from mainstream music. Nowadays it's either oldies acts or teenagers, performing for Baby Boomers or their dewy spawn.

This is how old I am, but when you were a naive kid and you finally discovered the radio station that played Journey and Aerosmith (*Toys in the Attic* Aerosmith) and Joe Walsh and the Eagles and Heart and all that gloriously god-awful "classic rock," you believed they were adults making adult music and to some extent handing down adult wisdom. (You know, like Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused.) Which was a cool world to grow into when you were 13 or 14.

Nowadays kids just get the mirroring and self-reinforcement of the Jonas Brothers or Hannah Urbana or whatever terrible scream-o shit they listen to, and they don't grow into any adult world, they just bring their vapid, lip-gloss, Facebook, Wii-world with them.

Although that might not be any worse, looking at this video. But at least the old and the average-looking could still get paid. For sucking.

Well said, PK.

I've been trying to get those crazy kids off my lawn for weeks.

when you were a naive kid and you finally discovered the radio station

Yeah, 103 WSHE "She's Only Rock 'N Roll"

I could hear "Kashmir" and "Love Removal Machine" on the same station. That's what I had my alarm clock on starting around 8th grade. One day in 12th grade there was a kid in class gigglingly describing having just heard "Immigrant Song" (and thus Robert Plant) for the first time to the amusement of those listening to him, and I thought "what the hell have you been listening to all this time, ya loudmouth jackass?"

JohnnyVonAwesome- That analogy is perfect. They do grow on you. It might kill you in the end, but maybe not right?

Here's the thing...I do that song in my band. When "Seperate Ways" is sung by a girl, it becomes this awesome Lesbian Power Anthem. Picture it. Just saying.

But I'll tell you this: I'm never gonna give you up. Or let you down. Or run around and desert you. Holy sweet macaroni. That has to be one of the most subtle rickrollings ever. And come on, the whole dancing in front of the fense thing was revolutionairy.

Ok, I HATED hair bands in the 80's - being a dedicated Punk who swerved into New Wave/Romantics for the girls...

But the reality is, Steve Perry has pipes. I mean the stuff is stylized over produced crap, but he nails the high notes without a lot of falsetto wispy crap.

Just listen to people trying to sing along in a car to old Journey, and you get a sense of just how hard it is to pop those notes consistently.

I'm just sayin'

You know, I have a soft spot for Poison, and it's not because I watched both seasons of Rock of Love like a mindless, drooling idiot. I was on a terrible blind date one night (the guy kept trying to hold my hand, stroke my hair, touch my back, just really physically invasive and he tried to analyze why I wasn't responding well), and had forgot to set up my "bail-out" system where a friend calls and gets me the fuck out of that situation.

HOWEVER, a friend calls and says her friend bailed out on going to Poison and asked if I wanted to go. I bailed on my date, rounded a corner, and sprinted for the parking garage. So, in a way, Poison saved me from the most horrid date of my life (and a cuter, albeit drunker, guy gave me his number at the concert). Plus, that song about "look what the cat dragged in" isn't too bad.

Awwwww, eff yew for disparaging Journey! Journey was a huge part of the soundtrack to my childhood, and paved the way for my love of garage punk and all the indie crap I love today (yeah, I got drunk along the way, so the feck what?)

If you laugh at that video, know this: You are laughing at the aspirations of a tiny little two year old me who loved to dance, loved to sing, did everything, dreaming about someday sporting a shiny, luxurious Steve Perry 'do, takin' that midnight train goin' anywhere, all night, all nigh, oh, every night (yeah, I'm drunk right now, so the feck what?)