ShezCrafti on Nerd Lunch #82: Sitcoms of the 90s

Last week the crew from Nerd Lunch needed a last-minute fill-in spot for their show about 90s sit­coms, and I, hav­ing noth­ing bet­ter to do on any given night, obliged. Also I fig­ure I’m not sit­ting on all this use­less Roseanne and Full House knowl­edge for noth­ing. I’ve gotta let it breathe every now and then, like a fine $4.49 bot­tle of Arbor Mist.

Fill­ing in for Jeeg, I was joined by show reg­u­lars CT, Pax (sup, homie?), and fourth-chair guest William Bruce West . Hear us try to talk over each other about our favorite 90s sit­coms, why every show on TGIF sucked, the age-old debate of whether or not Sein­field was any good, and for­got­ten, lesser-known shows like Herman’s Head  (you’re wel­come) and Phe­nom . All your favorite shows are present and accounted for, and then some.

Plus, in a rather awk­ward fash­ion, I bring up that time on Rosanne when Dar­lene catches D.J. jerk­ing off. If I can offer one sell­ing point for this episode, it would be that.

Lis­ten to Nerd Lunch, Episode #82:

Nerd Lunch Episode #82 — 90s Sit­coms

Pia Zadora is a Little Bit of 80s Heaven

It was an odd set of cir­cum­stances that led to my dis­cov­er­ing actress/singer Pia Zadora and her lost 1985 sin­gle, “Lit­tle Bit of Heaven,” but I’m so glad I did.

I haven’t seen chore­og­ra­phy that amaz­ing since Laura Branigan’s video for “Glo­ria.” If I had known this song existed back in the 80s, I can eas­ily imag­ine Zadora shar­ing space on the mix­tapes I made, along­side artists like Limahl and Cindy Lauper.

As far as 80s fash­ion aes­thet­ics go, Pia Zadora’s out­fit is the absolute epitome.

Big hair? Check. Head­band? Check. Two-color eye­shadow? Check. It’s like one of the god­damn Mis­fits from Jem came to life. I espe­cially like the par­rot motif on her sweater, which is, of course, paired with match­ing skin-tight leg­gings and heeled boots. The only ques­tion I have is where can I buy one just like it?

As it turns out, I was already famil­iar with her but didn’t even know it.

In the process of adding the sound­track for John Waters’ 1988 film  Hair­spray  to Spo­tify, I hit a road­block when Spo­tify didn’t have “Day-O,” a song per­formed by Zadora that was used in the film, even though I couldn’t place it. Then it dawned on me–in Hair­spray , dur­ing the scene where Tracy meets the beat­nik chick (the one who famously irons her hair), she sings “Day-O” very briefly.  This led me to look­ing her up on IMDB and sure enough, the beat­nik chick is Pia Zadora herself.

Huh. Some­how I never made the connection.

Pia Zadora is quite a name. Curi­ous, I browsed YouTube to see if there were any other clips from movies she’s been in, like  Troop Bev­erly Hills, which is a movie I’ve seen like a zil­lion times. How the hell did I miss that? After dis­cov­er­ing the above video I looked her up on Wikipedia and found out about her singing career. Evi­dently Zadora has had nine albums. NINE. Unfor­tu­nately, Wikipedia doesn’t seem to have much info  about them.

At some point she also did a duet with Jer­maine Jack­son , which is every bit as awe­somely 80s as that sounds. Their song “When the Rain Begins to Fall” was used in a b-movie they both starred in together called Voy­age of the Rock Aliens.  This rab­bit hole just keeps get­ting bet­ter. I’m now on a mis­sion to find a way to lis­ten to the rest of her music and watch all these crazy-sounding movies she’s been in.

The inter­net is funny like that. I never know what I’m going to ran­domly stum­ble upon, nor could I have pre­dicted I’d be spend­ing my Sun­day after­noon blog­ging about it. I guess I’m like a Pia Zadora fan now or something.

John Waters Approved: ‘Hairspray’ 1988 Soundtrack on Spotify

It’s ridicu­lous how hard it can some­times be to find sound­tracks for the movies you love, espe­cially from older movies with out-of-print sound­tracks. Some­times there aren’t even legal ways to acquire it. Other times, the “offi­cial” sound­track that was released is incom­plete, lack­ing many of the key songs that made the film so mem­o­rable to begin with.

Such is the case with John Waters’ Hair­spray , the campy 1988 dance movie set in racially tense Bal­ti­more dur­ing the 1960s. Being from Bal­ti­more myself and a fan of cult movies in general–especially ones that involve lots of cheesy danc­ing and kitschy humor–it shouldn’t come as a sur­prise that Hair­spray is one of my favorites. (And just to be clear, I’m NOT talk­ing about the 2007 movie based on the musi­cal star­ring John Tra­volta in drag.)

The offi­cial sound­track that was released for John Waters’  Hair­spray  only con­tains twelve songs. You could  buy it from Ama­zon for less than $8 if you really want, but you’re only get­ting less than half the songs fea­tured in the movie. For exam­ple, none of the four Chubby Checker songs are included. Oh, you want Gravy for your Mashed Pota­toes? Don’t even think about it.

What’s a Tracy Turn­blad wannabe hair hop­per to do?

Luck­ily, I was able to find almost all of the orig­i­nal songs on Spo­tify, which is sur­pris­ing given the rar­ity of some of them. Although Spo­tify has a ton of playlists for the 2007 Hair­spray, it seems nobody yet both­ered to make one for John Waters’ orig­i­nal (ahem, supe­rior) ver­sion of the movie. I did what had to be done .

Now let’s get all rat­ted up like a teenage jezebel!

P.S: These are the songs I’m miss­ing that Spo­tify doesn’t have:

• “Hair­spray” — Rachel Sweet (this is the one I’m most heart­bro­ken about)
• “Life’s Too Short” — The Lafayettes
• “The Bird” — The Two Du-Tones
• “The Bug” — Jerry Dall­man and Mil­ton Grant
• “Day-O” — Pia Zadora
• “Wad­dle, Wad­dle” — Rudy Clark

Sup­pos­edly Spo­tify adds 10,000 new tracks to its music library every sin­gle day, so I’m hop­ing it’s just a mat­ter of time before these lost gems show up. When/if that hap­pens, you can be sure I’ll add them to this playlist! Also, if you have any of these tracks, you can always import them into Spo­tify your­self to sup­ple­ment what the ser­vice lacks with your own library.

Reckless Love Keeps 80s Glam Metal Alive

With the Amer­i­can music indus­try being what it is, per­haps the only thing sad­der than 80s hair metal falling out of fash­ion is that it’s now up to other coun­tries to fill the acid-washed void. Meet Reck­less Love , a glam metal band from Fin­land that you’d never know was from Finland.

I mean, just look at these guys.

Now I admit my knowl­edge of Fin­land is lim­ited at best. Being your typ­i­cal dumb Amer­i­can, to me Fin­land has always been that “other” Scan­di­na­vian coun­try, the one that’s not Swe­den, Nor­way or Den­mark. I get all those damn flags with crosses on ‘em mixed up, any­way. But if some­one hadn’t told me Reck­less Love was from Fin­land, I never would have known. If they have Finnish accents, I can’t hear it in the singing. And the music sounds straight out of the 80s, like some­thing you’d hear between Möt­ley Crüe and Ratt.

When I first heard “Ani­mal Attrac­tion” , for a split-second I thought “hey, cool, Poi­son has a new song out!” before real­iz­ing it sounded too fresh, too good to be what Poi­son sounds like now (which isn’t all that bad , actually).

What’s great about these guys is that they’re the same age right now as all those hair bands were back in the 80s, which means I can feel less awk­ward about want­ing to sleep with them. On the other hand, they have names like Ollie, Pepe, Jalle and Hessu. I can’t really envi­sion myself get­ting any of those tat­tooed on my ass. But also work­ing in their favor is the fact they started out as a Guns N’ Roses cover band, so the ass tat­too isn’t totally off the table.

Reck­less Love has two stu­dio albums under its leather-studded belt, 2010’s self-titled debut and 2011’s Ani­mal Attrac­tion , both with equally awe­some album art:

If the crotch of your leather pants is get­ting uncom­fort­ably tight just try­ing to decide what to lis­ten to first, don’t sweat it! Here are some of my recommendations:

Next month the band releases its next sin­gle, Night on Fire, which drops April 26th. Based on the cover art alone, I’m excited for it. A new album will fol­low in late sum­mer or fall.

I’m Never Gonna Say I’m Sorry for Loving Ace of Base

This week The League wants to know what our guilty plea­sures are. Well friends (that is, if you still want to be friends after this) the time has come for me to reveal my secret shame: my deep and uncon­di­tional love for Ace of Base.  I’ve been sit­ting on this gem for a long time, car­ry­ing the torch alone, wait­ing for just the right moment to pub­licly embar­rass myself.

But today you could say I SAW THE SIGN. (Sorry. Had to.)

No, you haven’t time trav­eled back to 1994. You’re look­ing at a very recent pic­ture of Ace of Base CDs and cass­in­gles that I still own. Present tense, baby. Though not quite as strong as it used to be, this photo is evi­dence of my undy­ing love for a band that, by and large, most peo­ple have for­got­ten, as well as evi­dence that I have ter­ri­ble taste in music. It is also evi­dence that “pop reg­gae” was once a thing.

Thou­sands of years from now when gen­er­a­tions far into the future dig up the fes­ter­ing remains of our once great pop cul­ture empire, they will unearth a tat­tered copy of  The Sign, stare deep into the mys­te­ri­ous pink cen­ter of its vagina-like album art, and pon­der its meaning.

The major­ity of you read­ing this prob­a­bly don’t real­ize that Ace of Base didn’t stop mak­ing albums after The Sign– which, if you remem­ber, was damn near inescapable with its string of world­wide hit sin­gles (includ­ing the infec­tious title song) bom­bard­ing the radio and cer­ti­fied nine-time plat­inum status–but they did.

In fact, the band’s sec­ond album  The Bridge was released in 1995 and was, in many respects, a far supe­rior album. Says me. You might remem­ber its ear­worm of a hit sin­gle, “Beau­ti­ful Life,” but prob­a­bly not much else unless you were A) a ded­i­cated fan; B) it was one of your “Just Add Two More CDs to Get Free Ship­ping!” selec­tions from Colum­bia House; or C) your name is William Bruce West . I recently learned on Twit­ter that Will is just as much of an Ace of Base fan as I am, call­ing into ques­tion all my previously-held beliefs about black guys. He even knows about “Ravine.” Every rec­i­p­ro­cated tweet was like a secret hand­shake wel­com­ing me into some loser-y club for which I thought I was the only mem­ber. How­ever, on the issue of Linn hav­ing a bet­ter voice than Jenny, well, Will and I will just have to agree to disagree.

This is how much I love Ace of Base: even though I own all of their albums on CD and dig­i­tally, I refuse to throw away this cas­sette tape.

After  The Sign , The Swedish pop act went on to record sev­eral more albums with com­pletely dif­fer­ent names out­side the United States where they were ignored–1997’s  Cruel Sum­mer  which cov­ered the famous Bana­narama song, and the long-awaited  Da Capo  in 2003–before ulti­mately break­ing up in 2009. A year later the band re-formed with two dif­fer­ent girls (and yes I own that album too).  But like Becky’s replace­ment on  Roseanne , the new girls are pret­tier but it’s just not the same!

As one of the first pop groups I can remem­ber being really into (some annoyed fam­ily mem­bers might say to the point of obses­sion, given they had to endure my end­less loop­ing of “Don’t Turn Around”), Ace of Base gave me my first harsh les­son about America’s rela­tion­ship with pop groups. Namely, how we devour them to the bone, then quickly shit ‘em out and flush. Of course, it didn’t help that Ace of Base’s upbeat, infec­tious pop infused with love and pos­i­tiv­ity ran counter to the flan­nel shirt depres­sion of grunge and alterna-rock that was so pop­u­lar dur­ing their brief period of star­dom, when they per­fected awe­some poses like this one:

Not to men­tion their endear­ingly cheesy lyrics, made all the more so given their less than stel­lar com­mand of the Eng­lish lan­guage. Sweet, naive, thirteen-year-old me was  cer­tain that a big Ace of Base come­back was going to hap­pen some­day, after every­one real­ized their genius. Only they never did. By the time I got to high school I learned to keep my AOB love on the down low, out­side of a few trusted friends who were privy to all my embar­rass­ing inter­ests, like Sailor Moon. Now that I think about it, this could have eas­ily been a post about Sailor Moon.

But hey! At least it’s not Justin Bieber, AMIRITE? In fact you, you can just copy and paste that last sen­tence  and use it for every­thing you’re ashamed of.

Before I go, this post would not be com­plete with­out one of Ace of Base’s clas­sic, uncom­fort­able music videos that make no sense. Play me out, you angelic songstresses of Swedish pop!

Expe­ri­ence some of these other pearls.

Won­der­ing what this is all about? This week’s assign­ment from The League of Extra­or­di­nary Blog­gers was to share one of our guilty plea­sures. I don’t know what can pos­si­bly be guiltier than Ace of Base, but let’s find out. Together!

• Under­Scoop­Fire! is the Corey Haim to my Corey Feldman.
• Calvin’s Cana­dian Cave of Cool likes high school girls…of the Mon­ster variety.
• Pop Rewind’s list will give you Goose­bumps. From Fran Drescher.

I’ll update with more guilty plea­sures as other Lea­guers com­plete the assignment.

Thank you for hold­ing. Your League post is very impor­tant to me. It will be listed here in the order in which it was received. Beep!

Oscars Mixtape: Best Original Songs of the 1980s

With the 85th Annual Acad­emy Awards hav­ing come and gone, this week’s League topic was an  Oscar-worthy  one. But the thing is, I don’t really care about the Acad­emy Awards like I once used to. I can’t stand the pre­ten­tious­ness, the media hype, the scripted jokes. Not even Seth Mac­Far­lane host­ing this year was enough to get me excited about them, so I was more than happy to spend the evening catch­ing up on video games and casu­ally mon­i­tor­ing my Twit­ter feed as friends reacted to the win­ners and  Ann Hathaway’s nip­ples .

Any­way, for this post I thought it would be fun to look back on The Oscars of a time when they mat­tered more to me: the 1980s. More specif­i­cally, I was curi­ous about past Oscar win­ners for Best Orig­i­nal Song. (Another post about 80’s music? Gee that never hap­pens around here.) What were the big 80s movies that spawned the most mem­o­rable songs of the decade? And look­ing back on them, do I agree with the win­ners? It was a fun exer­cise and trip down movie mem­ory lane. I mostly came to the real­iza­tion that the 1980s Acad­emy had a hard-on for what we con­sider today as “soft rock” or “easy listening”–you know, the kind of music you’d hear at your dentist’s office.

I rounded up all the win­ners for each year and posted them below for, um, easy lis­ten­ing . I also shared a cou­ple of my ran­dom thoughts on each song, and whether or not I think it should have won for Best Orig­i­nal Song.

1980 — “Fame”

Film:   Fame (1980)
Per­formed by: Irene Cara

As much as I love 80’s movies about danc­ing AND musi­cals, I’m actu­ally not a big fan of Fame– hard to believe, I know. But I do love the title song by Irene Cara, which clings to that dying era of disco for all its worth. In 1980, Fame  won Oscars for Best Score  and Best Song (in fact, two Fame songs were up for the award: “Fame” and “Out Here On My Own”, both by Irene Cara), but lost for Best Orig­i­nal Screen­play, Best Adapted Screen­play, and Best Sound. That sounds about right. This is one of those movies I think is more mem­o­rable for the music. (For what it’s worth, my 80’s musi­cal movie about musi­cals of choice is A Cho­rus Line .)

1981 — “Arthur’s Theme”

Film:   Arthur (1981)
Per­formed by: Christo­pher Cross

My mom had a huge obses­sion with Dud­ley Moore back in the 80s, which means I’ve seen almost every Dud­ley Moore movie there is to see, includ­ing Arthur , mul­ti­ple times. I’m not sure I would have picked Christo­pher Cross’ “Arthur’s Theme” over, say, “End­less Love” by Lionel Richie, but Christo­pher “I’m so sen­si­tive because I’m kind of ugly” Cross seems to have had a lock on on those smooth, early 80s love bal­lads that made women like my mom drop their panties at the first slow, drawn-out string note.

1982 — “Up Where We Belong”

Film:   An Offi­cer and a Gen­tle­man (1982)
Per­formed by: Joe Cocker & Jen­nifer Warnes

How to win an Oscar for Best Orig­i­nal Song in the 80’s: per­form your song in a duet with Jen­nifer Warnes. This song won an Oscar, along with her other famous duet, “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” from Dirty Danc­ing,  which we’ll get to in a minute.   This is another song that makes me think of my mom, who was really into those cheesy 80s love songs. In fact, at one point she owned a whole set of pastel-colored cas­sette tapes she bought from Time-Life Music called “Secret Love” that was full of songs just like this. She’s also the rea­son I’ve seen this movie more times than I care to admit. It’s not so bad, I guess; I like Deb­o­rah Winger. But if I were in charge of the Oscars that year, you  know  I would have cho­sen “Eye of the Tiger” by Sur­vivor, which lost out to this gag-fest of a ballad.

1983 — “Flashdance…What a Feeling”

Film:   Flash­dance (1983)
Per­formed by: Irene Cara

YESSSSSSSSSSSS. This song, you guys. Not only do I love Flash­dance , I LOVE THIS GODDAMN SONG. Like, you have no idea. It’s #1 on my list of cheesy moti­va­tional songs of the 1980s  and every now and then, if you get enough drinks in me, I’ll belt it out at karaoke. I def­i­nitely agree it should have won that year, con­sid­er­ing it was up against yet another song from Flash­dance (“Maniac” by Michael Sem­bello), some crap I’ve never heard of , and fuck­ing Yentl . A+, Academy.

1984 — “I Just Called to Say I Love You”

Film:  The Woman in Red (1984)
Per­formed by: Ste­vie Wonder

Wow, this was a tough year for Best Orig­i­nal Song. Look at the other con­tenders here:

• “Against All Odds”  - Phil Collins ( Against All Odds )
• “Foot­loose” — Kenny Log­gins ( Foot­loose )
• “Let’s Hear it for the Boy” — Deniece Williams ( Foot­loose )
• “Ghost­busters” — Ray Parker, Jr. ( Ghost­busters )

I know you fan­boys would have wanted me to declare Ghost­busters my fan­tasy win­ner, but I would have gone Phil Collins on this one. I’m sorry, but that song–along with most Phill Collins songs–is just fuck­ing fan­tas­tic . To steal a joke from my buddy Scott : My friends thought I’d never get over my Phil Collins obses­sion, but take a look at me now.

1985 — “Say You, Say Me”

Film:   White Nights (1985)
Per­formed by: Lionel Richie

I love ya, Lionel, but NO to this song. Not when I know “The Power of Love” from  Back to the Future could have won. I don’t care how lus­cious your mus­tache is–I’d rather ride Huey Lewis’s train even if I have to pay with a credit card.

1986 — “Take My Breath Away”

Film:   Top Gun (1986)
Per­formed by: Berlin

Who doesn’t love Top Gun? I’ll try to under­stand if you don’t, but just know you’re not any­body I could ever be BFFs with. I’m not a huge fan of this song, which I always found kind of depress­ing, but I can  under­stand the Acad­emy want­ing to give an award to Top Gun for  some­thing .   How­ever, this was another one of those years where some really tough deci­sions had to be made. “Take My Breath Away” was up against “Some­where Out There” from  An Amer­i­can Tail and Peter Cetera’s “Glory of Love” from The Karate Kid Part II. I would have fought for Glory of Love’s honor, all the way. It’s one of my favorite songs of all time. In fact, I’m lis­ten­ing to it on Spo­tify and singing it like a damn fool as loud as I pos­si­bly can RIGHT NOW. My cat is more than a lit­tle freaked out.

1987 — “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life”

Film:   Dirty Danc­ing (1987)
Per­formed by: Bill Med­ley & Jen­nifer Warnes

NOBODY PUTS BILL MEDLEY & JENNIFER WARNES IN A CORNER! Again, another duet with Jen­nifer Warnes, another Oscar. You know, I don’t even know what the hell Jen­nifer Warnes does out­side of singing shitty duets that win Oscars. I sup­pose I could look her up and what she’s all about, but I just can’t muster the enthu­si­asm. While I do love me some Dirty Danc­ing and “The Swaze,” I actu­ally loathe this par­tic­u­lar song on a deep, deep level. How­ever, I used to love this song when the movie first came out, but so did the rest of Amer­ica, which means it was EVERYWHERE. Back in 1988, my ele­men­tary school even put on a tal­ent show where no less than ten acts all used songs from Dirty Danc­ing, and guess which one was the most pop­u­lar? It haunted my life, it haunted my dreams, and nowa­days it haunts my tele­vi­sion every time I see one of those fuck­ing San­dals commercials.

Do I think it should have won for Best Song that year? Eh, sure, why not. I try to remem­ber that I too once loved this song, but if I could go back in time, I’d def­i­nitely pick Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” from the movie Man­nequin instead. That’s right up there with Peter Cetera’s “Glory of Love” in my book.

1988 — “Let the River Run”

Film:   Work­ing Girl (1988)
Per­formed by: Carly Simon

Here’s some­thing you prob­a­bly don’t know about me because I don’t think I’ve ever men­tioned it on this blog, but  Work­ing Girl is one of my favorite movies of the 80s. I love Melanie Grif­fith, who I just find adorable (pre-plastic surgery, obvi­ously), and of course Har­ri­son Ford and the always great Sigour­ney Weaver. And Joan Cusack! And Alec Bald­win! And a coked-up Kevin Spacey! And the fact that this movie takes place in New York City in the 80s. I love films that take place in 80s-era NYC. It’s just a great movie all around, and I love the big “fuck you” moment Tess gets to have at the end.

Any­way, it was slim pick­ins for Oscar music this year, with only two other con­tenders, both from movies I’ve never seen. I have no prob­lems with Carly Simon’s inspi­ra­tional “Let the River Run” win­ning for Best Orig­i­nal Song. When you hear it in the movie accom­pa­ny­ing those breath­tak­ing shots of the Twin Tow­ers, it’s almost enough to make me cry.

1989 — “Under the Sea”

Film:   The Lit­tle Mer­maid (1989)
Per­formed by: Samuel E. Wright

Ah, the start of Disney’s come­back era! This year there were two songs from The Lit­tle Mer­maid up for Best Song–this one, along with “Kiss the Girl.” Per­son­ally I would have picked “Kiss the Girl,” but both songs are pretty good. I’m cer­tainly glad Randy New­man didn’t win.

Any­way, I hope you enjoyed this look back at Oscar-worthy music from the 80s as much as I enjoyed pre­tend­ing to have bet­ter taste than The Academy!

Because you know you still love Top Gun and that damn song…

Won­der­ing what this is all about?  This week’s assign­ment from The League of Extra­or­di­nary Blog­gers was sim­ply, “The Oscars.” Here’s how my fel­low Lea­guers inter­preted the topic:

• Top Hat Sasquatch rounds up past Oscar win­ners who have action figures!
• AEIOU and Some­times Why totally stole my idea for an Oscar the Grouch-related post. Great minds…
• That Fig­ures lists some of his favorite “Oscars.”
• Branded in the 80s hosts his own Acad­emy Awards and rewrites Oscar history!
• The Com­bat Work­shop show­cases a model plane I’m glad is nick­named “Oscar” cuz I can’t pro­nounce its real name.
• Achieve­ments in Gam­ing plays a board game called Hol­ly­wood Blockbuster.
• For­tune & Glory Days shares some of his favorite win­ners for Best Orig­i­nal Score.
• Hench­girl breaks down (hilar­i­ously) the Five Kinds of Fringe Oscar Winners.

Bare Ass Optional: Discussing 1982’s ‘The Beastmaster’

Today over at Cult Film Club we’re dis­cussing one of my per­sonal favorite movies,  The Beast­mas­ter ! Released back in 1982 ( the golden year for sci-fi and fan­tasy films )  The Beast­mas­ter  is a mid-grade fan­tasy film that stars Marc Singer as the tit­u­lar hero and famous faces Rip Torn, Tanya Roberts, and John Amos.

I didn’t have to fight very hard with my co-hosts Pax­ton Hol­ley and Shawn Robare when I sug­gested we cover it in Episode 4. A half-naked, oily-chested Marc Singer? Bone-crushing bird crea­tures? Bare asses hang­ing out every­where? FERRETS? If The Beast­mas­ter isn’t Grade A, top-quality Cult Film Club mate­r­ial, I don’t know what is.

ShezCrafti Fun­fact #27: I totally had a crush on The Beast­mas­ter when I was a lit­tle girl. There’s just some­thing about that leather jock strap that does it for me.

Episode #4 — The Beastmaster

Head on over to the Cult Film Club pod­cast to hear us blather on about how much we freak­ing love this movie, or you can lis­ten right here.

Bare ass optional.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

You’ll wish ‘Space Stallions’ was a real Saturday morning cartoon, too.

Here’s some­thing super cool I’ve been mean­ing to share for a while that any lover of Sat­ur­day morn­ing car­toons and 80’s pop cul­ture can appre­ci­ate: Space Stal­lions !

As dark­ness is cov­er­ing the mul­ti­verse, far away in the galaxy of the wild stal­lion, a spark of hope is born. Guided by the light of Mother Mus­tang, the Space Stal­lions must defeat the Demon of dark­ness, Destructo.

Though I’ve had this book­marked for a cou­ple of months, I’ve been hes­i­tat­ing to blog about it. At the time I thought I had stum­bled upon some­thing so  amaz­ingly amaz­ing  and  uniquely unique  that nobody else knew about, only to find out it’s been  cov­ered by the likes of iO9 , Top­less Robot ‚ and other sites much big­ger than mine MONTHS before I dis­cov­ered it. Cue  Price is Right fail horn .

But after think­ing on it some more, and liv­ing with the knowl­edge this car­toon fea­tures A FUCKING MAGIC SWORD THAT TRANSFORMS INTO A KEYTAR,  I decided there’s no way I was NOT going to put Space Stal­lions on my blog. Some­times you just have to make gutsy edi­to­r­ial deci­sions.  (Also, I was in des­per­ate need of some fresh con­tent. I’m really scrap­ing the bot­tom of the bar­rel today, kids.)

Space Stal­lions, sadly, is NOT a real Sat­ur­day morn­ing car­toon from the 80s, but a 3D-animated film from 2012 by two stu­dents of Denmark’s famed  The Ani­ma­tion Work­shop , named  Thor­val­dur Gun­nars­son and  Jonatan Brüsch .  I actu­ally dis­cov­ered the  mega-awesome theme song  first on Band­camp, and for a time believed that’s all there was of Space Stal­lions. Imag­ine how my mind was blown when I also found out there was an actual ani­ma­tion and char­ac­ters to go along with it.

Had it existed dur­ing my child­hood (and I so wish it did), Space Stal­lions would have eas­ily taken their right­ful place along­side the Rankin-Bass clas­sics like Thun­der­Cats and Sil­ver­hawks.

Now if you’ll indulge me for a moment, I’ve come up with a wish­list of my own Sat­ur­day morn­ing car­toon ideas I’d love for some tal­ented ani­ma­tor to tackle:

Some­one please make one/all of these happen:

B.E.A.R.A.C.U.D.A.S.

Fear­some beasts of land and sea, these guys are either fero­cious armored bears that trans­form into fero­cious armored fish, or fero­cious armored fish that trans­form into fero­cious armored bears.  I didn’t bother com­ing up with it, but the acronym would be some­thing awe­some that reflects that.

AracadeBots

Nor­mal arcade machines that trans­form into giant mechs empow­ered by the moves and spe­cial attacks of their own video games. They’re con­trolled by a group of teens who hang out at the arcade all day and one day dis­cov­ered the secret code to make them work. The only down­side is they STILL have to shell out quar­ters every time, so they’re forced to live nor­mal kid lives and do things like work and chores in order to make the nec­es­sary coin to keep sav­ing the world.

SnailBlazers

Half-snail, half-human super­heroes who run at lightning-fast speeds and leave behind a trail of glow­ing, toxic slime. Being snails, they’re able to use their shells for pro­tec­tion as well as carry around an arse­nal of cool weaponry. Really, my whole ratio­nale behind this one is to know whether or not it’s pos­si­ble to make snails cool.

And it should also go with­out say­ing, all of these are set in the 1980’s.

The most ridiculous(ly awesome) pirate songs I know.

My first impulse after see­ing this week’s League assign­ment was “pirates” was to make a list of my Top 5 Favorite Pirates, but then I remem­bered I kinda already did that . It’s not the most meaty or well thought-out of posts, but then again I threw it together in ten min­utes for National Talk Like a Pirate Day, which I almost for­got about, and if I’m being com­pletely hon­est, I really wanted an excuse to work “Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr” into my title as a verb. That’s just good writing.

My sec­ond impulse was to write about Sid Meier’s Pirates , the clas­sic pirate sim game, but then I remem­bered only a small per­cent­age of my read­ers give a shit about video games, so I’ll save that par­tic­u­lar ram­bling for Run­Jump­Fire .

Also, thanks to Disney’s abil­ity to milk its own theme park rides for obscene amounts at the box office, and Johnny Depp’s will­ing­ness to keep suck­ing on that teat ‚  Pirates of the Car­ribean is usu­ally the first thing I think of when­ever I hear the word “pirates.” I don’t like that.

I will also never have generic pirate toys with rich and engag­ing back­sto­ries as cool as The Good­will Geek’s, so I was kind of at a loss for ideas.

But then, all of a sud­den, I remem­bered some­thing impor­tant. Some­thing pro­found.  Some­thing that dick-slapped me in the face with INSPIRATION.

I am a pirate!
And being a pirate is all right to be.
And more impor­tantly,
I can do what I want
because a pirate is free!

Such lib­er­a­tion, such poetry  comes from the great­est song about pirates (and most dis­turb­ing video) the inter­net has ever known:

“You Are A Pirate!”

by what­ever coke­head pedophile is respon­si­ble for Lazy­Town

Okay, so what if it’s the de-facto theme song for any­body who’s ever down­loaded any­thing ille­gally? (Which I’ve never done. EVAR.) You have to admit it’s fuck­ing catchy. As in, I catch myself singing this all the damn time. And also pon­der­ing the lyric, “We’ll dig up the box–we know it’s full of pre­cious booty!” That’s like a total euphemism, right? It’s also one of my life’s ambi­tions to learn Stephanie’s dance moves.

But any­way, I was ener­gized and encour­aged because I sud­denly had my angle for this post: more awe­some pirate songs.

“From the Seas to the Streets”

by Cap­tain Dan & The Scurvy Crew

You guys, PIRATE RAP EXISTS! I’m not just talk­ing about one sin­gle video here. THERE ARE LITERALLY WHOLE ALBUMS FULL OF THIS SHIT, with pirates rap­ping songs like “It’s All About The Booty” and “Real Swash­buck­lers (Throw Your Hooks In The Air).” I’d also like to take a moment to point out that Cap­tain Dan & The Scurvy Crew refer to their website’s home­page as “home port.” I don’t know why this excites me, but it does.

This is almost as awe­some as that time I dis­cov­ered Ninja Sex Party . Except not quite, because nin­jas > pirates.

“HOT Pirates of the Carribean”

A Sym­phony of the Word “Hot” by Hot Sym­phony

This one’s pretty self-explanatory, and the appeal of hot pirate bitches is obvi­ous. Plus, it’s easy to sing along with. HOT HOT HOT HOT HOT HOT HOT HOT HOT HOT HOT HOT HOT.

“The Gay Pirate Song”

by some guy named Trey Green

Okay, this one I actu­ally had no idea existed before today. I got to think­ing deep thoughts, as is so often the case when I’m writ­ing these posts, and said to myself, “Surely  some­one out there has made a song about pirates being gay.” A quick YouTube search later and I was well on my way to being enchanted by the sounds of Trey Green  (who is NOT a gay pirate, dis­ap­point­ingly) with lyrics like, “We pil­lage, we plun­der, for trea­sure and men, and for booty that’s free of dis­ease.” Just think of every ter­ri­ble pirate pun that could be twisted around to sound like some­thing homo­sex­ual (poop deck!), and you’ll have a pretty good idea what to expect from this song. I like things that are straight­for­ward if you know what I mean.

Oh hey, speak­ing of Gay Pirates , I was doing some “research” for this post (look, just shut up and stop judg­ing me) when I stum­bled upon THIS masterpiece:

It’s a piece called “Gay Star Trek Pirate Uni­corn” by an artist named Kina . I also feel com­pelled to point out that this was a com­mis­sion. That’s right. Some­body out there envi­sioned this, and then paid an artist to birth this from her cre­ative loins. Amazing.

YOU ARE A SMELLY PIRATE HOOKER.

Won­der­ing what this is all about? This week’s assign­ment from The League of Extra­or­di­nary Blog­gers was the topic “pirates,” which appar­ently won the vote against infi­nitely more awe­some top­ics like “nin­jas” and “robots.” (Really guys?) Any­way, here’s a sam­pling of some of the pirate-y things my fel­low blog­gers wrote about:

• Cav­al­cade of Awe­some loves the Mup­pets Trea­sure Island soundtrack.
• Branded in the 80s gets all pirate-y about Thun­der­cats, Pirates of Dark Water, and Garbage Pail Kids. YES.
• Redis­cover the 80s lists the best pirate vil­lains from 80s and 90s cartoons!
• Good­will Hunt­ing 4 Geeks has some lit­tle plas­tic pirate friends he’d like to intro­duce you to.
• The Com­bat Work­shop cus­tomized his own pirate action figure!
• For­tune and Glory Days men­tions one of my per­sonal favorite pirate pair­ings, Orange­beard The Pirate and First Mate Odie!
• Achieve­ments in Gam­ing  remem­bers the strat­egy game, Pirates of the Span­ish Main.

DJ Soul Presents the Fila x TMNT Mixtape

Here’s what I’m jam­ming on today at work:

Inspired by the sneaker col­lab­o­ra­tion between Fila and Teenage Mutant Ninja Tur­tles, [DJ Soul] teamed up with Nick­elodeon and recorded a mix to remind peo­ple of the influ­ence both brands have had in music and fash­ion since the 80’s. If you want to pur­chase the kicks, they are now avail­able on Fila.com and at selected retailers.

If you don’t like rap & hip-hop (*cough* @WallCrawlinHero *cough*), you’re prob­a­bly not going to enjoy the music on this mix­tape. But as far as I’m con­cerned, hip hop + Teenage Mutant Ninja Tur­tles is one of the  best com­bi­na­tions I can think of , so I’m really dig­ging this. It’s also worth lis­ten­ing to for all the TMNT car­toon and movie sound bytes pep­pered throughout.

You can lis­ten to the whole thing via Sound­cloud right here:

By the way, did any­one actu­ally man­age to score a pair of the lim­ited edi­tion Fila TMNT kicks? Last time I checked they were com­pletely sold out. Not that I wanted them or anything…

I’m possibly the only person who remembered it’s Ya Kid K’s birthday today.

Happy Birth­day, Ya Kid K ! Almost 25 years later, you are still pumpin’ up my jam .

I have to admit, I thought you were a dude when I first saw you per­form live on TV some­time back in 1989, before I knew what a les­bian was. Sorry about that.

In fact, your gen­der was a fre­quent before-bedtime hot topic for my older sis­ter and I, along with other stu­pid things like what exactly the “Cs” in C+C Music Fac­tory stood for, which New Kid was the ugli­est (answer: Danny), and whether or not Paula Abdul was part black. We were just dumb, spoiled lit­tle white girls who were raised on MTV and had noth­ing bet­ter to argue about, but were sis­ters, so as a rule we had to argue about some­thing . And this was years before the inter­net, so we couldn’t exactly look these things up. But we sure did wear the shit out of our Tech­notronic cass­in­gles! Me especially.

Like sev­eral other now-obscure musi­cal acts of the 90’s (see my posts about Part­ners in Kryme and Fifth Pla­toon ), my Ya Kid K fan­dom is directly asso­ci­ated with Teenage Mutant Ninja Tur­tles . You have the esteemed honor of being the only artist to have appeared on all three live-action TMNT movie sound­tracks, albeit under totally incon­sis­tent names:

• TMNT I (1990) — “Spin That Wheel”  cred­ited as Hi-Tek 3
• TMNT II (1992) — “Awe­some (You Are My Hero)”  cred­ited as Ya Kid K
• TMNT III (1993) — “Rockin’ Over the Beat”  cred­ited as Technotronic

These are sound­tracks I’m still lis­ten­ing to at age 31, and not just because I have nos­tal­gia blind­ness (deaf­ness?) for all things TMNT–no, I still lis­ten to these albums because there’s some damn good music on them, thanks in a big way to you. I’ve read biogra­phies  where you didn’t seem all that thrilled to have sold out in that way, like so many other artists who were swept up by Turtle­ma­nia, but if it’s any con­so­la­tion, you helped make my child­hood (and a lot of other kids’) a whole lot more awe­some.

And speak­ing of awe­some, your live per­for­mances were The Shit. Until you burst on the scene, I had never really seen any­one per­form with that level of energy and  enthu­si­asm. You could dance, you could rap, you could sing, and you had a funky-fresh style (yes, I feel it’s totally accept­able to use the 90’s slang term “funky-fresh” here) that was really unique.  And that voice is unmis­tak­able. I don’t think you get nearly the level of credit you deserve.

I can’t believe you’re 40 years old now. In my mind you’ll for­ever be own­ing that Arse­nio Hall stage.

More about my obsession with keyboards & synthesizers…

This is kind of a tan­gent I started in my last post , which was also synthesizer-related, and it was get­ting pretty long, irrel­e­vant (and prob­a­bly bor­ing!). So I thought I’d give it its own space.

My obses­sion with synth music is  pretty well-documented  around here, but I don’t think I’ve ever men­tioned my equally-obsessive love for the instru­ments them­selves. I’ve owned many key­boards and syn­the­siz­ers over the years–nothing that could exactly be con­sid­ered professional-grade, mind you, but ones embla­zoned with Yamaha, Casio, and Korg that are  just expen­sive enough  to make me feel like a total ama­teur unwor­thy of their ownership.

Side­bar: I never took piano lessons, but I can play pretty well by ear; to the point where I can make peo­ple  think  I’ve had lessons (much to my older sister’s cha­grin, who actu­ally did take piano lessons). I usu­ally just need to hear a piece of music one time and I’m able to pluck out the melody with my right hand while fig­ur­ing out the chords with my left. It’s gimpy and retarded and not at all the way you’re sup­posed to play piano, but I make it work somehow.

Skill-wise, I’m basi­cally just a slight step above Key­board Cat.

Any­way, my fam­ily ended up buy­ing an upright piano sec­ond­hand just so my sis­ter could take lessons. (Well, either that, or my mom just felt she needed another nice-looking piece of fur­ni­ture to drape with frilly doilies and knick­knacks,  which, if you’ve seen my parent’s house, you’d know is entirely pos­si­ble .) What­ever the case, it was cool to have grown up in a house with a piano. I ended up play­ing the damn thing more than my sis­ter did.

Before we got said piano, how­ever, we had this lit­tle beauty:

Yes, it was even PASTEL PINK, just like the one pic­tured above. This is the Casio SK-1 that was pro­duced in 1985 and came in an array of cool col­ors. If you’ve ever heard the White­town song “Your Woman” (one of my favorite obscure, under-appreciated tracks from the 90’s) you know what this thing sounds like because that song sam­pled the shit out of it. The pink one hap­pens to be the rarest, and I’m kick­ing myself for allow­ing my par­ents to have got­ten rid of it in a yard sale. I’ve seen this par­tic­u­lar “toy” key­board go for hun­dreds on Ebay, no joke. (More about the SK-1, includ­ing an orig­i­nal print ad, can be found here .)  I’m still very much lust­ing after the old pink SK-1 I used to have. I could buy a black one  right now  on Ebay for about $20, but I WON’T. I demand it to be pink. But some­where out there lurk­ing in the wild is a pink SK-1 with “Hood” Sharpie’d on the back…because my Dad always made us label EVERY toy that was expen­sive and could get stolen, like my Game Boy. I guess he fig­ured nobody would want it if they couldn’t show it off.

The main key­board I have right now is the 76-key  Casio WK-500 , which is quite large and cur­rently dom­i­nates one cor­ner of my office. I like it because I can hook it up to my com­puter and use it with soft­ware like Cakewalk…not that I have  any  idea what I’m doing, but I do enjoy tin­ker­ing and mak­ing cool sounds come out of it. It’s a hobby more than anything.

Any­way, I’ve been spend­ing a lot of time lately over at Vin­tage Synth Explorer and look­ing up cool syn­the­sizer videos on YouTube, espe­cially ones that show circuit-bending (which is how a lot of your dub­step sausage is made) tech­niques used on toy pianos ( another semi-obsession of mine ), like this awe­some  circuit-bent Mup­pet Babies key­board .

I’d really like to buy more equip­ment and get more into this sort of thing, and actu­ally learn to make coherent-sounding music, and not just my usual retarded mim­icry. When I inevitably start that one-woman synth band I’ve been dream­ing about–which is really just an elab­o­rate excuse to wear tight pleather and neon eyeshadow–I have my stage name all picked out and every­thing. I’d reveal what it is, but your head would explode from the sheer awesomeness.

Listen to me fail at 80s TV Trivia! [UnderScoopFire Podcast #57]

Last week I was a guest on the Under­Scoop­Fire pod­cast for the first (and quite pos­si­bly last!) edi­tion of What’s.. The.. SCOOP?!! — the 80’s TV Trivia game show hosted by Howie Decker’s charis­matic alter-ego, Dick Decker.  I’m one of three lovely con­tes­tants, along with internet-famous “blerd” (that’s “black nerd”) William Bruce West and Mr. Seri­ous him­self,  Corey Chap­man .

(Click the TV to lis­ten to the episode!)

It’s astound­ing how lit­tle I actu­ally know about 80s TV, as I find out in this pod­cast. But to be fair, hardly any of the shows I actu­ally watched back in the day came up as my ques­tions. I mean, where was Charles in Charge !? Where was Facts of Life !?  Also, I should point out that Will  is a Pop Cul­ture Kung Fu MASTER, so I was up against some pretty stiff com­pe­ti­tion, but I think I held my own pretty well. My sav­ing grace was Roseanne , Care Bears , Saved by the Bell , and those sweet, sweet multiple-choice ques­tions.

Hey, at least I didn’t come in dead-last! And for that I think a cel­e­bra­tory dance is in order:

Three ways to play:

– OR –

Lis­ten or down­load directly on the Under­Scoop­Fire website.

Album Art Porn: Hudson Mohawke — Butter

Well, it’s my sad duty to report this is the first edi­tion of Album Art Porn where the music didn’t turn out to be as amaz­ing as the album cover. But! Hud­son Mohawke’s “But­ter” still has a lot going for it. Let’s start with the obvious-the rea­son I gave this album a lis­ten in the first place:

I can’t get enough of this kind of lurid, 80s-inspired art­work. I am drawn to those col­li­sions of hot pink and Day-glo yel­low like…well, like this blue­berry scone I’m sit­ting here eat­ing that I could NOT say no to at Pan­era Bread. It seems like it would pretty be easy to cre­ate, too. Just take a nor­mal photo of some ani­mals (lizards seem to be pop­u­lar sub­ject mat­ter), desat­u­rate the col­ors a bit, apply neon over­lays, then add some Miami Vice-looking text and call it a day. I’m not exactly sure what any of this has to do with “But­ter,” and there isn’t a song by that name on this album, so that part was a lit­tle perplexing.

But what does it sound like?

Speak­ing of per­plex­ing, I have no idea how you’d even clas­sify the stuff on this album. But I did find this lit­tle tid­bit on Wikipedia; empha­sis mine:

” Hud­son Mohawke is a pur­veyor of the hip-hop/electronic off­shoot that is some­times known as aqua-crunk or wonky , although Hud­son does not accept these labels.”

“Aqua crunk?” What­ever. It’s electronica–that much is clear–but it’s all very bizarre and exper­i­men­tal, and mostly accom­pa­nied by sketchy, incon­sis­tent hip hop beats. It’s almost jazz-like in that there’s no rhyme or rea­son to a lot of the instru­men­ta­tion, and often times just sounds like noise. But some­times there are flick­ers of awe­some­ness, like the track “Joy Fan­tas­tic,” which is one of the few that has vocals. I’ll give “Star Crack­out” a pass, too, since it sam­ples chip­tunes that sound like they came from the orig­i­nal Metroid on NES.

It’s cer­tainly inter­est­ing music and con­tains a lot of unique sounds, I just don’t think I could lis­ten to it more than once. It’s the type of thing I might con­sider putting on in the back­ground while I work, but that’s a big “might.” Five stars for some­thing I don’t want to lis­ten to again might seem a lit­tle gen­er­ous, but I’m award­ing points for cre­ativ­ity here.

As always, if you have Spo­tify, you can lis­ten to this album right here:

ShezCrafti’s Rating:

5 out of 10 stars.

What is Album Art Porn?

A recur­ring fea­ture in which I ran­domly pick an album I’ve never heard of to lis­ten to and review based solely on its cover art. It could turn out to be the most amaz­ing thing I’ve ever heard…or com­pletely suck. Find out with me!

Saw it. Loved it. Cried a lot. Now I can’t stop comparing.

My sis­ter and I saw Les Mis­er­ables over the week­end. If you’re plan­ning to see it, A) make sure you like musi­cals, and B) make sure you  really like musi­cals, because it is lit­er­ally over two and a half hours of singing. I only say this because some peo­ple seem not to have got­ten the mes­sage that this film is a direct adap­ta­tion of the Broad­way musi­cal Les Mis­er­ables , as opposed to Hugo’s orig­i­nal novel (although some ele­ments of that were incor­po­rated to great effect). My sis­ter, for exam­ple, didn’t quite grasp exactly how musical-y it would be and thus didn’t care for the film (even though I totally warned her).

Any­way, I don’t want to write a full review apart from say­ing I loved it. I just wanted to remark on how impressed I was by Saman­tha Barks’ per­for­mance in the role of Épo­nine. She totally stole the movie for me–which is say­ing some­thing, con­sid­er­ing she shared the screen with Ann Hath­away (who made me cry like a fool). Épo­nine is the char­ac­ter who sings my favorite song, “On My Own,” so I was really look­ing for­ward to seeing/hearing it the film.

I did some Googling when I got home and found this Saman­tha Barks per­for­mance from 2010, which was filmed for the musical’s 25th Anniver­sary. It’s a much dif­fer­ent style than the way she sang it in the film* (which was much more raw, emo­tional and inti­mate), but it gives you a good rep­re­sen­ta­tion of her singing ability:

*If you’re inter­ested in hear­ing it the way she sang it in the film, that ver­sion can be found on Spo­tify . I learned Saman­tha pre­vi­ously starred as Épo­nine in the Lon­don pro­duc­tion of Les Mis­er­ables from 2010 — 2011 before being asked to star in the film, which was her first movie role ever. I am impressed, Miss Barks.

Saman­tha Barks vs. Lea Salonga

Up until see­ing Saman­tha, my only basis for com­par­i­son was Lea Salonga. Here’s her ver­sion of “On My Own,” which also blows me away every time I watch it:

Lea has such incred­i­ble con­trol over her pow­er­ful voice, but Barks’ imper­fec­tions actu­ally work in her favor, espe­cially for a char­ac­ter like Épo­nine, who’s so vul­ner­a­ble. I guess what I’m try­ing to say is, even though I think Lea has bet­ter range and abil­ity, I felt like I con­nected more emo­tion­ally with Saman­tha in this role.

This is one of the things I love about musi­cals (and by exten­sion film ver­sions of musi­cals): see­ing how the cast changes, and what each new per­former does bet­ter or dif­fer­ently. It can also be a lit­tle frus­trat­ing at times, because you go to see a musi­cal and and find your­self wish­ing you could mix and match from pre­vi­ous and cur­rent casts to achieve the per­fect lineup. But for me that’s all part of the fun.

So, who do you think sings it better?

New Retro Wave: The 80’s Dream Compilation Tape

If you enjoyed the Rosso Corsa 80’s music  dis­cov­ery I posted about a few weeks ago, you’re going to love this.  New Retro Wave , or NRW, is yet another newly-forming label and YouTube chan­nel ded­i­cated to 80’s revival music. Here’s an intro­duc­tion lifted from their Band­camp page:

For many years the music scene has been hun­ger­ing for some­thing that will fill a long­ing void. You have now stum­bled across that sound .…..the sound of the future.……the RetroWave sound. Har­ness­ing the sound of the 80s and bring­ing a mod­ern pres­ence, Retrowave promises to bring back the nos­tal­gic feel and dar­ing musi­cal­ity to what we call music. Turn your speak­ers up and “Live the 80’s Dream.”

Sold.

Just released in late Decem­ber, the NRW put out  The 80’s Dream Com­pi­la­tion Tape , a glo­ri­ously 80s-tastic album com­prised of 13 dif­fer­ent retro wave artists–such as Let Em Riot –who all man­age to re-capture a slice of that dreamy, syn­thy era of 80’s music I love so much. And HOLY HOT PINK NEON, just look at this album art!

The entirety of the album can be heard for free on Band­camp, and is avail­able as a “Name Your Price” down­load, avail­able in MP3 or FLAC. Def­i­nitely worth what­ever you’re will­ing to pay.

[via The Curi­ous Brain ]

They say we’re crazy but I just don’t care…

This may seem like a ran­dom thing to post to the casual observer, but it’s actu­ally an indi­rect reveal of one of my top picks for a super-secret Top 50 list Howie Decker is putting together for Under­Scoop­Fire and he asked me to contribute.

So many pos­si­bil­i­ties must be run­ning through your mind–is it a list of the Top 50 Awe­some 80’s Songs You’ve Com­pletely For­got­ten About??  The Top 50 Weird­est Paul McCart­ney Cameos?? The Top 50 Music Videos that Fea­ture Bowl­ing?? You’ll just have to wait and see.

I have no idea how the vot­ing process will work, so this may or may not even make it into the final Top 50, but that’s of lit­tle con­se­quence. It’s a fab­u­lous song and Tracey Ull­man is fab­u­lous singing it. She also hap­pens to be one of my favorite come­di­ennes of all time and I wel­come any excuse to post any­thing of hers.

 Appro­pri­ately, this song is from Tracey’s 1984 debut album which is titled, “You Broke My Heart in 17 Places.” Yup, that about sums up how I feel lately.

The best damn 80s synth music you’ve never heard.

It was a com­bi­na­tion of happy acci­dents that led to my dis­cov­er­ing Rosso Corsa Records , a small, inde­pen­dent label that spe­cial­izes in super 80s-esque synth music that would totally rock my nuts off if I did indeed have any nuts to be rocked off. More pre­cisely, they spe­cial­ize in some­thing called “out­run elec­tro” (a genre they coined), dreamwave, and chill­wave of the 1980s per­sua­sion. If you liked the music in Drive ‚  you already have a good idea of what to expect here.

First there was the inci­dent where I was attempt­ing to queue up “Crockett’s Theme” from Miami Vice in Spo­tify (you know you love it too, shut up) and acci­den­tally clicked the auto-suggested best match of an artist by the name of Miami Nights 1984 , who I decided to lis­ten to based on the sheer awe­some­ness of that name alone. I imme­di­ately loved what I heard, so I starred the artist for later lis­ten­ing. A few weeks go by and then a video teaser for a new comic book called  Skull and Shark pops up in my feed, via Kotaku of all places, who had the good sense to include the name of the artist who con­tributed the totally rad music. It was an artist called Laz­er­hawk . Freak­ing LAZERHAWK, you guys! I  wanted to find out more. No, I needed to find out more. My Awe­some 80s Music Sense was tingling.

What it feels like when this happens:

The sim­i­lar­i­ties between Laz­er­hawk and Miami Nights 1984 were imme­di­ately clear–that is, totally syn­thy and 80s-tastic! I began to won­der if I had stum­bled upon some under­ground revival move­ment for this style of music, and as it turns out, I kinda did. A lit­tle bit of research led me to the afore­men­tioned Rosso Corsa Records who spe­cial­ize in exactly this kind of 80s-infused, throw­back elec­tron­ica, and I wasn’t at all sur­prised to learn that both of these artists are on the Rosso Corsa label, or rather, I should say they are the label . And now we’ve come full circle.

I’d like to give you a lit­tle taste of each of the artists on the Rosso Corsa Records label so you can expe­ri­ence the awe­some for yourself–you can thank me later. I’m also going to post some of their album art because it’s every bit as awe­some as the music itself, and because you know how I have a thing for cool album art .

Lazerhawk

So for pretty much the past week straight I’ve been lis­ten­ing to Laz­er­hawk dur­ing my daily com­mute. It is  per­fect dri­ving music, espe­cially at night on those wind­ing, deserted back roads through the woods I take between here and my new office. It makes every­thing feel  intense,  but in a good way. I just wish I could be dri­ving KITT to get the full effect .

“Elec­tric Groove” — Lazerhawk

A found­ing mem­ber of Rosso Corsa, Laz­er­hawk is Gar­rett Hays from Austin, Texas, USA. His out­run elec­tro is robot pop mixed with dark synths and the occa­sional lyric. Two years ago I described him as rem­i­nis­cent of every­thing that was good in the 80’s: syn­the­sizer jams with gar­gan­tuan leads, hard toms, spaced-out melody and the pains of being pure at heart. Since then he has exper­i­mented with chill wave and disco, but with a fun­da­men­tal link to the 80s.

Miami Nights 1984

This is where my adven­ture down the rab­bit hole started; as I said above, I was look­ing for Miami Vice music and acci­den­tally lis­tened to Miami Nights 1984 instead. It’s shap­ing up to be the best mis­take of my music-listening life. I had a hard time choos­ing WHICH awe­some MN84 song to share. I could have picked any of them, really. I rec­om­mend putting on your white Armani-style jacket while giv­ing this a listen:

“Tiger 42″ — Miami Nights 1984

Miami Nights 1984 is Michael Glover from Vic­to­ria, BC, Canada. His obses­sion with the 1980s has led to the found­ing of Rosso Corsa Records and a revival of syn­the­sizer music. With Rosso Corsa he is cham­pi­oning many artists such as Mitch Mur­der, Laz­er­hawk, Jor­dan F and Lost years to make 1980s-inspired music with mod­ern fidelity.

Mitch Murder

I haven’t yet had a chance to lis­ten to every­thing by Mitch Mur­der , but believe me, it’s on my to-do list. The few tracks I’ve lis­tened to in full, like this one here, are sim­ply fantastic.

“Fran­tic Aer­o­bics” — Mitch Murder

Mitch Mur­der is Johan Bengts­son from Stock­holm, Swe­den. His new wave styles and smooth pro­duc­tion are some­what of a rar­ity these days and that’s why he’s a large part of Rosso Corsa.Back in 2008 we heard a cou­ple Mitch Mur­der tracks on myspace and were blown away by the clean pads, com­plex bass lines and clever chord pro­gres­sions.  Since then we have been blessed with two Mitch Mur­der albums here at Rosso Corsa: Burn­ing Chrome from August, 2010 and Cur­rent Events from Novem­ber 2011.

 

Lost Years

Any­thing that sounds like it could be on the sound­track to Beyond the Black Rain­bow gets a whole­hearted thumbs-up from me.

Today we have the dis­tinct plea­sure to intro­duce Lost Years to the Rosso Corsa fam­ily and announce the world­wide release of their first EP: Nuclear. Three tracks wide, the new EP is a post-Terminator epic inspired by John F Kennedy’s “com­mon ene­mies of man” inau­gu­ra­tion speech. The 1980s run deep in the EP and it’s a new exten­sion of our own Out­run Elec­tro.

Jor­dan F

I couldn’t find much infor­ma­tion about this artist, but he has released a cou­ple of indi­vid­ual tracks and EPs through Rosso Corsa. Here’s his Face­book page  and Band­camp page . The lit­tle I’ve heard so far is aces; I’d love to hear more.

“Last Night” — Jor­dan F

HOLY SHIT THIS IS AWESOME MUSIC!

I know, right!? If you want to hear more, I thor­oughly rec­om­mend you browse through Rosso Corsa’s music blog , which con­tains tons of great music and videos from every artist affil­i­ated with them, as well as links to works by sim­i­lar artists they rec­om­mend. It’s like one big 80’s music orgy over there. If you have Spo­tify, you can also sub­scribe or lis­ten to this Rosso Corsa playlist I’ve gone through the trou­ble of com­pil­ing. (Again, you’re wel­come!) I’ll con­tinue to add more stuff to it as my dis­cov­er­ies unfold, but for now, it already con­tains over 7 hours’ worth of some of the best god­damn 80s synth music you’ve never heard.

ShezCrafti on Nerd Lunch Podcast #64 — Ninja Day!

I’m hon­ored to have been a guest on the always awe­some Nerd Lunch Pod­cast , espe­cially for Episode #64 where we observed and cel­e­brated that which is the most beloved and impor­tant day of the hol­i­day sea­son, NINJA DAY.

In this Ninja-tastic episode of Nerd Lunch, we watch and review  Ninja III: The Dom­i­na­tion  star­ring Lucinda Dickey (of Breakin’ and Breakin’ 2: Elec­tric Booga­loo fame) as an aer­o­bics instruc­tor who gets pos­sessed by the spirit of an aveng­ing ninja and goes on an epic killing ram­page.   Why the Oscars passed on this one, I will never understand.

Join me, CT, Jeeg, and Pax for awk­ward dis­cus­sions about nin­jas doing awe­some ninja-y things, play­ing arcade games while wear­ing leo­tards, how V8 Juice is bet­ter than sex, freak­ishly exces­sive body hair, and why  Ninja IV: The Pros­e­cu­tion needs to hap­pen. I hope you like Vanilla Ice.

Lis­ten here:

Nerd Lunch Pod­cast #64 — Ninja Day

The Cult Film Club is here to rescue you from boring movies.

The cat’s sort of already out of the bag about this, but a few posts ago I hinted at my involve­ment in a new pod­cast project, and now I can offi­cially announce it:

I, along with hosts Pax­ton Hol­ley of Cav­al­cade of Awe­some and Shawn Robare of Branded in the 80s , have com­bined our pow­ers of awe­some to bring you Cult Film Club , a monthly pod­cast and blog about MOVIES WE LOVE TO DEATH–the weirder, more obscure, or awe­somely bad, the bet­ter. We’ll be cov­er­ing movies from the 60s, 70s, 80s, and beyond, with a good mix of action, mar­tial arts, exploita­tion, com­edy, west­erns, drama and prob­a­bly even some that we’ll be at a loss to prop­erly cat­e­go­rize because they’re just that ridicu­lous.  We’ll also be rotat­ing host duties and movie selec­tion every episode, so you’ll get to expe­ri­ence the full breadth of our amaz­ing and/or ter­ri­ble taste in movies. And trust me, the movies will be amaz­ing and/or terrible.

Lis­ten to our promo:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

I am DYING to tell you what movie we’ll be cov­er­ing in our first episode, but you’ll just have to wait until this Wednes­day, Decem­ber 5th to find out since that’s when our first episode drops. But here’s a hint–it stars some­one really famous who loves hook­ers and blow. I know, there’s SO MANY PEOPLE IT COULD BE.

Cou­ple of other things I wanted to men­tion real quick:

• The Cult Film Club is part of The Atomic Geeks Pod­cast­ing Net­work , the same net­work that brings you Nerd Lunch (required listening).
• Shawn designed the incred­i­bly rad logo you see above–that is, assum­ing you haven’t gone blind from star­ing into its sheer awesomeness.
• I bet you didn’t know Pax does a bitchin’ Ice Ice Baby .
• We have a Face­book!  Please like it.  Like it HARD. We’re also on  Twit­ter  (@CFCpod).

Oh, one more thing — please help us out by  sub­scrib­ing to us on iTunes . (You can just lie to us and say you lis­ten reg­u­larly, we won’t check up on it. But I hope you’ll lis­ten anyway!)