Saturday, April 6, 2013

Ode to crap

For the past few weeks I've been trawling YouTube, lookinbg for videos of songs I enjoyed in the 1980's. Sometimes the music holds up, but the videos are almost uniformly awful. Take, for instance, the one below: "Mr. Roboto" by Styx. Right here in one tidy little package is everything that was wrong with the '80's pop/rock zeitgeist. I don't even have to make a list of the atrocities. If you're brave enough to watch for yourself, you'll catch them on your own.

So why am I posting the thing here? Because it typifies something else that many of you can relate to. When I was a teenager coming to grips with my fetish, shit like this was hot to me. It made me squirm, half happily and half uncomfortably, because it felt so weird to be turned on by something this - let's face it - dumb. I was especially uncomfortable watching robot or MC material with anyone else around. It was like having one of those "naked in public" dreams. I got the same sensation watching Dance Fever (part of my weekly Saturday night routine) whenever anyone did The Robot, or with Superfriends, or dozens of other totally innocuous TV shows and movie scenes.

So this post is really about nostalgia, and how much tougher things were for my generation. This is my version of "When I was a kid, I had to walk ten miles to school every day. In the snow. Uphill. Both ways." It's also a good opportunity to fantasize that the segment beginning at 4:20 ends differently, and/or to laugh at the suggestion of male cameltoe.


2 comments:

Uzobono said...

Wow...my generation, 16-24ish (90's kids) have it *so* much better :p...probably don't appreciate it as much though :p.

Anonymous said...

Oh! Wow - I totally get that too! The "uncomfortable watching with anyone else around" thing, I mean. And the half-and-half shudder. I have a different fetish it happens for, but it absolutely feels like that. I never realized that was a common experience. That is very cool to know.

(And I'm an early 90's kid, actually :) )