Lots of things from the past are dated, but they don’t all get the vitriol of the '80s. Yeah, big hair was in back then, so what? Fashions, TV, music, architecture, everything stylistic goes through changes. Men don’t wear jackets and ties to baseball games anymore. Someday, they’ll stop wearing their baseball caps backwards. Full beards seem to be ‘in’ right now, eventually they’ll be ‘out’. I’ve never understood why that seems to surprise so many people. “Look how narrow our ties were back then! What were we thinking?”
Yeah, and Mr. Drysdale was still a money-grubbing asshole and Miss Hathaway was a stuck-up intellectual snob, so it’s not like the show went out of its way to just insult rural folk.
I’ve heard it claimed, and even more often debunked, that marijuana is evil not on its own, but because it leads people to try harder and harder drugs. I don’t know if I believe in gateway drugs, but I do believe in gateway music. You outgrew the Spice Girls? Congratulations, you were supposed to outgrow the Spice Girls. We need music when we’re young that we can love the first time we hear it, and claim it as our own. Our tastes develop and we move on, to jazz, or classical, or blues, or funk, or whatever, but you owe a debt to the Spice Girls, or Britney, or Justin, or ABBA, for getting us hooked when we were young and impressionable.
People like Drysdale and Hathaway never change in real life. But you’d think nine years of living in a mansion in Beverly Hills would have some effect on anyone of average intelligence.
I don’t think either of those are embarrassing…I used to love looking through Boris Vallejo’s books at the bookstore when I was a kid, though I never bought one and I usually had to hide the contents from the other customers as I perused the sordid illustrations. But they’re fucking badass! He’s an extremely talented painter, there’s no two ways about it.
Foreigner is awesome, they had a number of really good pop-rock songs, I don’t ask much more of a band than that.
I think of prog rock as being sort of the British equivalent to American jam band music. There’s extreme musical talent there, but there’s also a lot of noodling. Prog noodling is perhaps less improvisational and more scripted than jam band noodling, but it can get equally tedious when a song takes too long to get from one distinct musical section to another. All of Yes were absolutely killer musicians though, and when they were in the zone, they were in the zone, especially with the Fish (Chris Squire) ripping it up on the Rickenbacker.
I sometimes wonder what things we do now without batting an eye that will come to be seen as morally unacceptable in the future. Could be circuses, rodeos, eating meat, or maybe something that’s barely on our radar now, like overuse of antibiotics or letting medications seep into groundwater.
“Eight Men Out”. I don’t know about embarrassed since it is still a well made film with only minor flaws (players with fingers outside their gloves, Dickie Kerr getting strikeouts for the final outs of his two wins, Joe Jackson shown playing for Hoboken in 1927 when he actually played in Bogota-the producers said they changed that because people would think Bogota, Colombia not Bogota, New Jersey). But I have decided the eight players were crooks, plain and simple. They weren’t as poorly paid as people have made them out to be in recent years.
My first favorite show was the Dukes of Hazzard :smack:
I would bitch and whine endlessly if we weren’t home by 7 on Friday to watch it. I was far to young to even say I was watching for Daisy. The only thing I can defend it as is that it is the closest thing live-action TV had to a cartoon back then,and it was a transition medium.
Despite some rather shallow stuff trending towards schlock (mainly in their reunion years (plus those often cringeworthy and dated drug tunes), their peak years had some pretty good tunes which have stood the test of time (IMHO). I too was into them from c. 11-15 years old, but have recently reconnected with them.
He was the straight man with a cast of crazies around him. He did what he was supposed to do. I happen to think the show has aged pretty well.
I’m not embarrassed that I liked certain shows. I was a kid and didn’t know any better. What embarrasses me is that we only had one tv and my parents had to watch the shows too. Dukes of Hazard, A-Team, Buck Rodgers… all awful shows.
Similar thing: when I was 13 I lived with my grandma, and if we weren’t back to her house by 3 p.m. when ‘Where The Action Is’ (a music show with Freddie ‘Boom boom Canyon’ and Paul Revere and the Raiders) was on, my day was ruint. That was the closest to music videos we ever got. I’m not embarrassed, music was a lifeline for a lot of us. Something bigger, better, more interesting out there.
I’m chagrined to say Ted Nugent was my first rock concert. In my defense, the plan was to see Alice Cooper, but my friend’s mom made an executive decision at the ticket outlet.
Can’t argue the point, but the lyrics are so stoopid that I can listen and embrace the Nuge Stupidity.
I actually love the songs Hey Baby, and also Free for All. Man, Free for All has a kinda variant-Bo Diddley groove that just rocks. But he’s still an idiot and I knew it back then.
Good question, and I don’t know. The music isn’t the issue for me. I just rolled my eyes through the two episodes I revisited.
However, I must stick of for the Beverly Hillbillies, which I enjoy to this day. I think it is criminally underrated, the writing is much more complex than it appears on the surface, and I’d be thrilled to be one of Elly May’s critters any day of the week.
I’ve been seeing reruns of The Lone Ranger lately. I’m struck by how very little effort the guest stars on most episodes put into actually emoting. They just say their lines like they are reading the instructions on a package. “You didn’t have to kill him” is said with as much emphasis and feeling as “close cover before striking.” (The same goes for Tonto, but the poor guy wasn’t given much to work with in the first place.)
I can think of no other band that SHOULD consume a young person’s formative years than 1967-72 Moody Blues. Not a lot of ‘singles’ in there, no, but each album is itself a transformative experience with just a beanbag chair and some dim lights (drugs optional–I’ve never listened to them on drugs, maybe I should). I’ve got about 15 years on you, trust me, you want to keep this band in mind when 40 starts getting small in your rearview mirror.
Now that I know a little about Scott Adams’ political leanings, I’m ashamed to have been a Dilbert fan.
When I was REAL young, I thought Video Village was a cool game show with an awesome set. Watching it on YouTube, I’m baffled why it didn’t ruin Monty Hall’s career.
Another for the real young time- I used to think the Nancy comic was funny.
For a very brief time, I liked Chicago’s music. What a fool I was.
