It’s not crap, but I’d like to hear a story…
So many pop-country songs from the 80’s and 90’s. I grew up listening to the stuff and songs that I would never listen to now like Queen of My Double Wide Trailer by Sammy Kershaw, *Daddy Never Was the Cadillac Kind * by Confederate Railroad, or Boot Scootin’ Boogie by Brooks and Dunn take me immediately back to my prepubescent and early teenaged years.
It IS crap, but I’d like to hear the story…
Oh, man. Don’t EVEN get me started. 
That Dan Fogelburp song the goes “Deeper than … , Wider than … etc”
The Pina Colada song
Color My World.
Any further back and we’re talking about disco.
Berke Breathed wants his royalties for that…
Oh, god, Dung Beetle! I’ve Never Been To Me always puts me in mind of something like Zoolander, not because the song was in it (to my recollection, it wasn’t) but because it seems like it SHOULD have been in it, right down to the heartfelt, so-sincere interlude where she’s berating the liberated women of the world for wanting to be anything other than a mother and wife. It’s a perfect parody of ITSELF, which makes it High Camp, even if unintentionally.
Great. Now that freaking song is stuck in my head. “I’ve been to paradise, but I’ve never been to me-eee-eee-eee.” Argh!
There was a time I frequented karaoke bars. Well, one in particular. Until it burned down.
The system that was all the rage at the time had “videos” that went along with the songs. The one for Never Been to Me contained the antics of two fake Barbies (you know the kind - they’re Barbie-sized, but super cheap hollow plastic and terrible hair). At one point, one of the dolls rips the shirt off the other one. I don’t know why. I will never forget that image.
I’m cackling my ass off here because I have polluted all your brains!
One of these days… 
Barry Manilow crooning “Mandy” takes me right back to Married Student Housing, and I mean right back, kazam! like that, I’m back in a 100 square foot concrete block apartment with blue-green carpet glued to the cement floor, a young newlywed sittin’ on the couch listening to the radio while Himself is at class.
The radio playing on a stereo which we still possess, BTW, vintage speakers still intact, and which our youngest has recently been using to play her dad’s collection of Beatles records, having just discovered those lovable moptops thanks to an abysmal movie called Across the Universe.
When we were 12, my best friend and I choroegraphed a jazz dance to Roxette’s “The Look” and performed it at a talent show. I still live in fear that video footage of this will someday surface.
There are many other crap songs from the early 90s which induce nostalgia, but Milli Vanilli’s “Blame It On the Rain” is in a special category.
There are so many. In my teen years (the 70s), I was one of those who always had a radio nearby, and it was always tuned to the local Top 40 station. So I have plenty of cheesy song + memory combinations. A few examples:
1977: Cruisin’ for chicks in my buddy’s '69 Chevy Malibu while Alan O’Day’s “Undercover Angel” blasts (as best it can) from the AM radio.
1977: Kenny Nolan’s “I Like Dreamin’” was on the air. But she was no dream, she was in my arms. Her name was Caroline.
1978: Meatloaf’s Bat out of Hell album is released, and provides much food for discussion around the poker table. Turns out we all wanted “silver black phantom bikes” and to “see paradise by the dashboard light.”
There are many, many more, of course. All I need to hear are these pieces of music, and I’m transported back. It’s kind of fun.
The “Taste of Chicago” features a free concert, but you have to wait until the end of the day for it. We were finished eating and really didn’t want to dawdle any longer, but as we meandered past the concert shell they were setting up and testing the equipment, and we hear the unmistakable plink-plink, plink-plink, plink-plink, plink-plink, opening chords of Foreigner’s “Cold as Ice”.
Well, there was no leaving at that point.
The concert was a blast.
“Fat Bottom Girls” by Queen.
“Friends in Low Places” by Garth Brooks.
“Sister Christian” by whats-it (I can’t remember the band name).
Anything by Sheena Easton or Gloria Esteban.
God forgive me, but “These Dreams” by Heart, to this day, reminds me of riding in a crappy old beater of a car, packed with fellow hormone-addled teenagers, with slim, lithe little Heather on my lap, smiling at me, then kissing my neck.
Siiiiigh.
Night Ranger?
Starship - We Built This City
Huey Lewis - Hip to be Square
Baltimora - Tarzan Boy
Romantics - Talking in Your Sleep
Wang Chung - Everybody Have Fun Tonight
Kenny Loggins - Danger Zone and Footloose
Falco - Rock Me Amadeus
Go Go’s - We Got the Beat
Toni Basil - Hey Mickey!
M - Pop Musik
ABC - Poison Arrow
Phil Collins & Phillip Bailey - Easy Lover
Glenn Frey - The Heat Is On
Pointer Sisters - Neutron Dance
Steve Miller Band - Abracadabra
Except this is an awesome song that induces nostalgia, not crap song.
Now, GET ON YOUR BIKES AND RIDE!
My drinking buddy (DB) used to request this song for the bar hostess to sing, and then DB would get all weepy. Never did get around to asking DB why the image of fake Barbie being raped affected him so deeply.