Dear Bowling for Soup, Debbie isn’t the only one stuck in 1985.
I loved the '80s. I was rocking out, living large and things were totally tubular. Yeah, we were being trickled down on by Reaganomics, but we rocked and rolled all night and partied every day.
Then the future happened. No one was looking at us in 1984, we didn’t party like it's 1999, and there was no space odyssey in 2001. As many older people have oft lamented before me, “It’s the future and there are no jet packs or flying cars.”
My generation, and the one before it, was obsessed with stuff flying around in the sky. Blame George Jetson.
Suddenly it’s today, and I’m listening to Go Go’s and I am hanging out with friends discussing the oxymoronic appellation “Classic Pop.” Can any of this stuff we listened to actually be considered classic? Our lips are sealed.
I remember the day some teenager turned to me and said, “What’s an album?” I explain that in the ancient times we played music by sticking a needle on big black vinyl discs as they spun around and around, right round, on the record player, right round. The teen recalls seeing them on “That '70s Show.” I am, of course, mortified by his sudden revelation.
Flashback: I’m 10 years old again in the back seat of my parents' car, my dad is smoking non-filtered Camels and the windows are rolled up, and we’re listening to oldies. My little brother is kicking the back of my dad’s fine Corinthian leather (there were no car seats). My mom is complaining about her beloved Elvis Presley being called an “oldie.”
I’m Jailhouse Rocked back into the present. In my head, I have a vision of the Ouroboros, the mythological serpent who swallows his own tail, and I have a revelation of my own, an asp slap, if you will; everything is cyclical.
When my mom was checking into Heartbreak Hotel, she never thought that she would be forty-something with three kids fighting in the backseat of the Chrysler Cordoba listening to the same music and being told it was old.
Someday someone, maybe the aforementioned teenager who barely remembers the word album, will be driving his own children around and the Black Eyed Peas will come on the radio and his kids will bitch and moan about being forced to listen to old people’s music. “Imma be” sad, because Fergie Ferg won’t be kicking it from the 21st century into infinity.
The saddest part is it will be the future and they won’t have jet packs or flying cars, either. The future will be like every other future. It will just be there like every other day, but everybody will be older.
If I live to see that day, I will still be kicking it old school, Holmes.