The holy grail of embarrassment … July 4, 2010

I haven’t posted on here in forever but I decided to revive this blog.

What better way to do that than with, what I consider, the holy grail of bad musical taste.

Yes.  “Pumps and a Bump.”  If you’ve seen “Too Legit: the MC Hammer Story,” you’ll recall the scene where Hammer (having dropped the MC in order to seem more “gangsta”) befriends Tupac and records this travesty.

Would it have been so bad if someone else had recorded it?  Hard to say.  But no one has been able to explain how you go from “We’ve got to pray just to make it today” to hanging with hos by the pool while sporting a Speedo.

I actually bought this album.  In contests for who owns the most embarrassing album,  I bring up this little mid-90s gem and no one ever seems to be able to top it.

If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go wash the shame off of me…

(Edited to add: Yeah, the quality of the video could make you queasy.  Unfortunately I can’t seem to find anything better on YouTube.)

The other part of my Saturday morning routine October 21, 2008

So, last post I talked about what my Dad, sister and I used to watch on Saturdays when my mom was away at work.  Kids Inc. was not exactly Dad’s cup of tea.

What we watched afterwards, though, was:

I’m not sure what Mom would have thought if she knew we watched this.  Religiously.  So that we knew all the characters and who was good and who was bad.  This was the 80s (obviously) and we were still in the throes of the Cold War.  Of course they had a Soviet character.  She was bad and her backstory involved being a member of the KGB.  When the Cold War ended, however, she became good because Russia was now our ally.  Go figure.

And yes, that is Sylvester Stallone’s mother trying to rap.  That was the thing in the 80s.  Everyone thought they could rap.

Part of my Saturday morning routine… October 5, 2008

When I was a kid (around 6 or 7 years old) my mom worked on Saturdays meaning my sister and I spent the morning with Dad.  Those were fun days.  First of all, my sister and I had pretty long hair (she still does, mine has varied throughout the years).  He only knew how to comb it one way so we’d wind up with longer versions of his hairstyle (which has not changed as long as I’ve been alive, except it’s more gray).  We had our morning tv routine and, when things got especially dire, he’d take us to a matinee.  We once watched The Care Bears Movie three times in one day.

So when he and I argue about Obama versus McCain, and he wonders where he went wrong because our ideologies are so vastly different from his, I can think about how much he really loves us because the man really has put up with a lot.  Case in point:

We watched this every Saturday without fail.  Mari and I would climb into his recliner with him and we’d watch it together.  To be honest, I think he secretly enjoyed it.  As some of my friends know, my dad is actually pretty hip when it comes to music.  (Imagine my surprise when I came home from college once to find he had learned all the words to “Shake Ya Ass” by Mystikal.  Talk about traumatic.)  So Kids Inc., which was really the TV precursor to those somehow popular Kidz Bop cds, really was a way for the three of us to share a common bond.

Watching the clips, it’s a reminder why drugs are bad.  Look at how cute and fresh-faced Fergie was before she became a meth-head:

Mario Lopez, on the other hand, was always kind of a meathead.

Metapost: Was ’80s music really that bad? September 29, 2008

I have been meaning to post this since I heard it at the beginning of the month but, well, life got in the way.  The always awesome All Songs Considered recently offered up an entire episode aimed at answering the audiophile question for the ages:  The ’80s: Were They Really That Bad?

It’s kind of hard to think positively about a decade that kicked off with the murder of John Lennon (a sign of the terrible things to come?).   Some of it was truly bad.  Prime example:  “We Built This City (On Rock and Roll).” Some of it was pretty good.  I’ve gained an appreciation for the Talking Heads and the Clash as I’ve gotten older.  A lot of guilty pleasures remain in my iTunes music folder (Journey, ABC, Toto (oh, God, Toto…).

And I don’t care how much the gang at All Songs Considered decries this song as among the worst of the ’80s.  Whenever I hear it, there’s a part of me that’s still six years old and gets excited every time it’s on:

Edit: Upon further review, the crime here is not the over-synthed sound.  It’s the really.. uh… fancy dancing in the video.  And maybe Deniece Williams’s hair.

Additional Edit: The video got taken down … but a search for a replacement video inspired a new post.

Some trends should be left in the fashion vault. September 18, 2008

Katie Holmes, I’m looking in your direction.

 

Why, God, Why?

Nothing sends me back to middle school more than this look which I pray DOES NOT CATCH ON.  DO YOU HEAR ME, PEOPLE?  DON’T LET THIS SPREAD.

I did this until about the eighth grade when I finally realized how stupid it looked.  I can understand pegging (or as we called it, French cuffing) your jeans if you are going out into the deep woods and you don’t want anything to crawl up your legs.  But see that pic on the left?  That, invariably, would happen throughout the day — at least one leg would come loose and you’d have to do it up again.  It adds up to a waste of valuable boy-watching time.  

Thankfully, it seems from my sister’s magazines (I refuse to buy my own copies of US Weekly or Star) that this was labeled a DON’T.  I’m blaming the thetans.

She’s embarrassed? September 15, 2008

I don’t feel any shame for still enjoying this to this day:

Maybe Robin Lively should be embarrassed for taking part in this Teen Wolf rip-off.  But this brings the awesome like nothing else.

It should be noted that I had no idea what the mechanics of a French kiss included until I saw this movie.  Pretty much everything I know about relationships I learned from an 80s movie.  Which explains an awful lot when I think about it…

Maybe the world is blind…

Or maybe just I was.  How else could you explain my wanting to dress like this:

This is definitely in the annals of “What Was I Thinking?”  Also, thank God my mother had some sense.

Granted I was eight when Punky Brewster first aired.  Granted she was abandoned by her mom and perhaps that was the excuse for the fact that she dressed like a colorblind homeless person.  But really?  Two different colored Converse?  A bandana tied around the knee?  What was it supposed to do there, anyway?  Serve as a tourniquette?  How did it stay up?  It wasn’t for another ten years that I realized that wearing one pant leg up had gang connotations.  Were we supposed to think this live-action Rainbow Brite was hardcore?

Of course, this show also introduced us to the star of another cheesy late 80s show:

Wow, you’re hot! September 8, 2008

And everyone knew it when you wore this:

A Hypercolor T-shirt

For some reason in the very early 90s, it became cool to wear Hypercolor.  This was one of those fads that came and went rather quickly and with good reason.  Some sort of chemical was in the fabric that would cause the shirt to change color in response to heat.  This sounds cool in theory.  HOWEVER, your armpits would inevitably be bright pink so not only would it look like you had a sweating problem but that maybe you had some sort of glandular problem that turned your perspiration neon.  Also, if you had bosoms (and Lord knows I did), that whole area would change color.  It was basically a neon sign telling all passers-by “Look at my boobs!”

Which leads me to my next point.  Because I really was sort of innocent when I got the shirt (mine was an azalea color that turned a bright orangy pink).  I had no idea that people would see the shirt as carte blanche to grope you.  I would walk down the hallways in middle school and random people that I did not know would just come up to me and grab me in random places and say (afterward) “Does this really work?”  I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.  A combination of excited and appalled at the same time, I think.

After a while the color stopped working and then it wasn’t fun any more.

Apparently they made Hypercolor shorts (according to Wikipedia).  I can’t understand why that didn’t take off.  I mean, who wouldn’t want to walk around with a neon crotch?

Stuff I enjoy now that I should be embarrassed about… September 6, 2008

If I was 10 instead of 27 when this came out I would probably have eaten this up.

And I know there is definitely nothing cool about this candy coated fluff.  I love Degrassi the Next Generation but that’s teens with edge — drugs, abortions, STDs.  In the first High School Musical Troy and Gabriela don’t even kiss.

So what would account for the fact that I will watch this every time it’s on?  Maybe I’m a sucker for Kenny Ortega (even if you don’t know who he is you’ve seen his moves in Dirty Dancing).  Maybe it’s the fact that it’s the story of two teens who broke free from their molds to pursue what they really enjoy.  Probably it’s the fact that I would have LOVED IT if people suddenly started revealing their secret desires while singing and dancing in my high school cafeteria.

Not everyone should rap… September 5, 2008

Though that hasn’t stopped people.  One word:  SHAQ.

I’m not sure what my excuse for buying this album was:

Yes, long before she married Dave Navarro, long before she was in Scary Movie, and on Baywatch, before she was in Playboy and hosting Singled Out, Carmen Electra was a Prince protegee who released an album.  And behold, its glorious suckitude.

I will say that as a sophomore I was taking classes at United Rhythms Dance Studio and we we danced to one of her songs (not the one in the video).  That was the impetus for buying the tape (back when the music store at the mall was called Record Town).  And I (more than likely) embarrassed myself at Platt’s one and only talent show (at least while I was there) by performing a self-choreographed dance routine to the song I first heard in dance class.  Unfortunately (or perhaps fortuitively) I never got the tape back from the people who put together the talent show.

On the plus side, that is Prince singing backup and I believe that video was featured in an episode of Beavis and Butthead.  So it’s got that going for it.