"Election Day" by Arcadia

1985 / #6

Rate Your Music score: 3.24 out of 5!

"We're coming up on re-election day..."

Arcadia was a Duran Duran splinter group that was active around the time our big local stations seemed to eschew Duran Duran - even their biggest hits. Arcadia's biggest single - "Election Day" - peaked way up at #6 on the Hot 100, but if we go by airplay on major local stations, it just doesn't seem like a #6. David Bowie received similar treatment, as he seemed to be largely confined to smaller stations for a while.

What the hell is "re-election day"? I'm old enough to remember when we had an election day. But I guess now it's re-election day, because incumbent parties file frivolous lawsuits against their opponents to knock them off the ballot, or it's like my area where the parties make backroom deals not to challenge elected officials. But now it's not just incumbents who run unopposed. They'll let one party nominate its worst newcomer and go unchallenged in November. That doesn't always work out, because there have been a few times when a party miraculously didn't pick its worst candidate, but the goal is to have the absolute worst "leaders" we can dredge up.

The "Election Day" video has a scene that is strikingly similar to a later advertising campaign. Notice the faces in the wall at 34 seconds into the above video. That shot is like the "Halls of medicine" ads for Halls cough drops in the early 1990s...

When I was in college, someone gagged on some food while walking down the hall, and somebody likened it to those Halls ads.

Every little thing the gag reflex does leaves you answered with a question mark!

"I Like" by Men Without Hats

1983 / #84

Rate Your Music score: 3.51 out of 5!

Life has always seemed to get stupider and stupider, but even rough times have bright spots. Even in a disastrous year like 2020, I smiled my ass off as I strolled down the boardwalk in Ocean City, Maryland, that September.

There were already lots of weird medical theories afoot in the 1980s. It wasn't nearly as bad as the flat earth 2020s are, but still bad. By then, if you disagreed with anything a school did, it was assumed there was something wrong with you. Big Pharma made lots of money by diagnosing everyone with ADHD. Schools also used ADHD as an excuse to coerce parents into taking their kids to therapists of the school's choosing.

Sometimes this backfired, as the school didn't like the answers the doc gave. The school - out of retaliation - would then shop around for new therapists until they found one that satisfied them. Meanwhile, you'd realize the first therapist wasn't so bad.

The first therapist might even have a radio in the waiting room that was completely unguarded. The doc had no secretary or receptionist, and there were usually no other clients in the room. Nothing but a shelf with a few magazines and an Ernie and Bert puzzle.

You know what that meant, don't you? That meant I didn't have to slog through the MOR fodder that the radio was tuned to. I could just change the station.

I remember one time when I changed the station and I heard Men Without Hats' "I Like." This song is not to be confused with a parody of Tom T. Hall's "I Love" that was sung by a guy who sounded like Oscar the Grouch. That was a completely different song with the same title.

Often, when the doc noticed the station had been changed, he bopped along and changed it back. He didn't say a word about it though.

One other time, we were at a sporting goods store and the radio was tuned to a Reds game. I reached up and changed the station to static. Customers were horrified, because they thought there was some disaster at the stadium that knocked the game off the air.