Posts Tagged: 1980s

Pop Culture — No Comments
13
Sep 08

My Tutor

We just enjoyed a viewing of MY TUTOR from 1983 from the SCHOOL DAZED DVD collection of forgettable films–not to be confused with the early Spike Lee Joint.
On would think the early appearance of Crispin Glover is enough of a seller, but standouts also include:

  • Matt Lattanzi, former Mr. Newton-John and father of a Cradle Rocker who apparently now lives in a Teepee.
  • Carol Kaye, who was also in TEEN WITCH (Top That, Top That), and
  • Kevin McCarthy, a great poor-man’s Jason Robards

    • There is also an additional subplot worth noting: the Chrysals’ domestic help pretend to speak no English in the presence of their employers, but eloquently discuss the merits of a Stanford education with no accent when alone.
    Neato!

    Pop Culture — No Comments
    20
    Aug 08

    Number One of the Popiest Pop

    #1 “Forever Young” by Alphaville (1984)

    I stated recently that sometimes I believe I would be happy if people forgot how to make music following the composition, recording, and subsequent release of “Forever Young” by Alphaville for the following reasons:
    1. The sheer awesomeness of the song.
    2. Lyrics such as the awesome second verse:  

    “Let us die young or let us live forever / We dont have the power but we never say never / Sitting in a sandpit, life is a short trip / The musics for the sad men.”

    3. The brass synth solo.
    4. A handful of other reasons.

    A friend (actually a never-met friend of a friend) chimed in that he felt the first 15 seconds of “Forever Young” outweighed the combined career artistic output of many lesser musicians.

    I tend to agree.

    A great little factoid concerning Alphaville is that it was founded in the early 80s by three Germans with fake, more-Western-sounding (?) names:
    Marian Gold (Hartwig Schierbaum),
    Bernhard Lloyd (Bernhard Gößling), and
    Frank Mertens (Frank Sorgatz).

    Why bother with the aliases, guys? 

    My Wiki-research tells me that the band was originally to be called Forever Young as well.

    We can call this the Big Country Condition. It rarely works to the benefit of the song or the band (such is the dubbing of the condition for a time it “worked”).

    In any case, the band went by Alphaville (named, I guess, after the Godard film) , released “Big In Japan,” (which was neither big in Japan nor the U.S. really, but was a big hit everywhere else), one dude no one cares about left the band, then came “Forever Young” all between 1983 and 1984.

    This is the great song we are discussing here today (actually just doing this to test out WordPress).

    There was an ironic Indie cover of it a few years ago.

    It was in a bunch of movies (mostly ironically included).

    Alphaville (in some incarnation) is still performing the song somewhere.

    Favorite Wiki-fact: In the trivia section of the Wikipedia entry for “Forever Young,” someone has felt it important enough to state:

    “On VH1 Classic’s show 120 Minutes it is a very popular music video that is played.” 

    Here is the YouTube video.

    Here is the Wikipedia entry.