my power pop addiction, no. 16 (88)

I think the Greg Kihn Band is even more of a dicey proposition than Missing Persons. Remember the patently awful Our Love’s in Jeopardy song that played on MTV like once an hour in ’82 or ’83? Just horrible stuff. Really bad. I used to watch a lot of MTV at my older sister’s house during the Golden Age. She was married to a corporate lawyer who knew a lot about rock and took me under his wing. They’re long since divorced, of course, but they were total yuppies at the time. I mean, dictionary definition. They accumulated mountains of stuff. Electronic equipment. Flimsy furniture. Grooming tools. Perfumes and tons of cosmetics. Betamax tapes, including soft core pornos with Sylvia Kristel, who also was the marquee star of my wet dreams. A white Mercedes convertible with tricked out rims and something called a ‘compact disc player’ installed in the trunk, which skipped all over the place anytime you drove over a pothole. Humidifiers. Exercise bikes (that they never used). Sleek cooking utensils. Fancy bedding and closets packed to the gills with clothes and shoes and jewelry and god knows what else. They even had a fucking electric drum set for christ’s sake! So much utterly unnecessary stuff. I wonder where all that junk is now? Do you ever think about that? Is it in someone’s garage, or is it in, like, a landfill beneath a golf course? The thought freaks me out a little, you know? Multiply it by a gazillion times over decades and decades and decades. For all the conservative talk about 70s blindness to consequences – the ‘if it feels good do it’ stereotype - the Reagan mindset was far more nihilistic. If you want it, even if you don’t need it, buy it, because buying it will make you feel good, and if it makes you feel good then there’s nothing else you need to worry about, like the possibility, 30 years hence, of some yuppie detritus Swamp Thing rising up out from the 13th hole at your local muni golf course. I’m vamping here because there’s really not a lot of compelling stuff I can say about the Greg Kihn Band, far as I can tell, except that tonight’s song is very catchy and has a great power pop feel to it. The striped shirts almost give them a faint veneer of semi-New Wave respectability. Almost. I wonder where those striped shirts are now?