Saturday, November 2, 2024

"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.

No comments:

Post a Comment