Oh My God! I Totally Love This Song!


SMILE LIKE YOU MEAN IT BY THE KILLERS


Many people my age (the olds) look back on the 80’s as a time of musical and sartorial splendiforous as if nothing could compare to those wonderful ten years. I look back with some fondness because, hey, I was a teenager, but mostly with disdain at the horrible fashion and shitty music. While we all liked to think we were in whatever sub-group we chose, in my city you could decide to be punk/new-wave/batcave/whatever but you only had one or two stores to buy the goods to be in that sub-group so everyone was a half assed version of whatever they were trying to express. Unless you were a rocker or a preppy, you couldn’t really kit yourself out in the duds of your choice. So if you were punk it was punk/preppy or if you were batcave, it was batcave/rocker. There were exceptions, of course, if you had lots and lots of money, but nobody in my neighborhood did.


Also, while we all like to look back on The Smiths, The Cure, REM, Husker Du and whatnot, in my city, before the Internet, there was only one music channel and it played a lot of really crappy stuff. I mean there was good stuff mixed in but for the most part, the 80’s top 40 was stuff like Huey Lewis or songs from the Top Gun soundtrack. In retrospect, we pick and choose from the good stuff and add it to our iTunes and every era has it’s fare share of awful music and fashion but for me the 80’s takes the cake.


All of this pre-amble is because this song sounds exactly how I wished the 80’s actually sounded. This new wave meets rock song kicks my ass still and the message would have suited my sarcastic 16-year-old self.


Looking back on sunsets on the Eastside, we lost track of the time:





And someone is playing a game in the house that I grew up in: