"Go Insane" by Lindsey Buckingham

1984 / #23

Rate Your Music score: 3.52 out of 5!

In the mid-1980s, music-related media even had an influence on Dungeons & Dragons!

"Go Insane" is part of a group of lost hits from that time - such as "Are We Ourselves?" by the Fixx and "Along Comes A Woman" by Chicago - that tried to sound like Devo, even though Devo was past their peak by then. That time frame also represented a confluence of music videos, Atari BASIC, and Dungeons & Dragons.

We came up with a list of 100 curses to use in a Dungeons & Dragons session. They were numbered from 00 to 99 and were randomly determined by rolling the 10-sided dice twice. These curses could be cast on an adversary.

This was all fantasy, of course. It was only a game. Nothing real about it. You put the dice and books away, and it was gone.

The curses grew increasingly ridiculous as you went down the list. Curse #48 made a 10-foot-tall Sesame Street sign grow out of a person's head - because Channel 48 is one of our local PBS stations. Curse #57 made Heinz 57 sauce constantly shoot out the person's ears. My personal favorite curse was "arms control selves."

After seeing Lindsey Buckingham's "Go Insane" video, I came up with a curse for this list: The person's head would turn into a globe and spin endlessly - just as in the video. Best all, it would take place in public, for maximum humiliation. Not to be outdone, another curse was added in which the person's head would turn into a replica of the Liberty Bell.

"Go Insane" also had a link with my interest in computer programming. I remember a story on American Top 40 in which it was reported that the music for this track was stored on a floppy disk.

"Go Insane" may well be the mid-'80s manifest!

"Press" by Paul McCartney

1986 / #21

Rate Your Music score: 3.26 out of 5!

"Oklahoma was never like this..."

What the hell did Paul mean when he sang, "Oklahoma was never like this"?

This isn't a misheard lyric. Those are the actual words!

This ranks right up there with Billy Joel's "We had no Softsoap." But at least we knew what Billy was singing about, even if it was a ridiculous thing to worry about. I have no idea what Paul's reference to our 46th state is about. I remember radio DJ's making fun of it back in 1986.

Maybe he wasn't singing about the state of Oklahoma but rather a neighborhood in my area that was gentrified after a local newspaper spread a rumor that residents were eating horses. An online comment says the line is actually about the musical Oklahoma!, but that would make even less sense.

Then there's the video. The "Press" video was filmed on the London subway. Unlike TANK, the London subway actually went somewhere, so people actually used it. Paul picks his nose at 1:35. The woman at 2:48 acts as if somebody just let loose with a big, stinky fart.

It's a shame Paul didn't film this video on a TANK bus instead. So few people use TANK that he wouldn't have been bothered much. The few people using it would have been busy brawling among themselves, throwing cans out the window, or grabbing used wads of bubble gum off the floor.

"China" by the Red Rockers

1983 / #53

Rate Your Music score: 3.46 out of 5!

Before this lost hit by this New Orleans band came out, most information I had about China - and other countries - came from old cartoons and was full of misunderstandings. These days, we have to contend with American news outlets that have partnerships with Chinese state media or have capital projects in China, and the false ideas of today are different from those of old.

At the time of the Red Rockers' hit, what interest I had in China was fueled by the antiquated misconceptions I had. I was only 10. But most of this entry is not about a country. It's about yet another personal anecdote.

One evening back in 1983, Men At Work's Colin Hay appeared on MTV as a guest VJ. During that hour, Colin conducted a brief interview of members of the Red Rockers...

Now, the thing about this is that I considered Men At Work to be the greatest band in existence. In fact, I thought they were the greatest anything in existence! Nothing in the history of the universe had ever been better. So I waited all week to watch Colin's MTV appearance.

I started watching it, but after a few minutes, my mom decided that my behavior was too unruly to be permitted to continue. So I wasn't allowed watching the rest of it.

That story has a connection to China. A couple years later, Men At Work planned on giving concerts in China. But the Chinese government scuttled this plan, saying that another act from the Western world - namely Wham! - had destroyed the morals of the country's youth by performing there. It was as if the Chinese government had its own PMRC. Or maybe the PMRC had its own authoritarian government. Or maybe it was both.

"Dancing In The City" by Marshall Hain

1978 / #43

Rate Your Music score: 3.15 out of 5!

At the age of 12 or 13, around 1985-86, one of my goals was to see the inner workings of a radio station. Not the big stations where the studio was occasionally seen on the news if there was some story involving them. I'm talking about the smaller stations like WCLU.

I wanted to figure out why their records skipped so damn much - when their turntables worked at all. I was listening one day when one of their turntables actually broke. Until "turntable #2" was fixed, they had to pipe in music from a mobile studio they had. It was an amazing listen!

The closest I ever got to the station was just before signoff one evening when we drove back behind Latonia Plaza and saw their building resting forlornly in a field. Many years later, I actually saw photos of the inside of the studio posted online - complete with format clock and David Lee Roth poster.

But when I was 12, I could only imagine what the studio looked like. Phil Collins's "Don't Lose My Number" and Sade's "The Sweetest Taboo" filled the den as the signal creepily braved our gray sky, but I had to paint a mental image of the studio.

My image of WCLU fumbling with its equipment dredged up an incident I had in the back of my mind. It might not have even taken place. It might have just been the power of suggestion. I recalled that I had a record that my parents confiscated because I listened to it too much. According to this narrative, they hid it atop the kitchen cabinet. But by the time I was 12, there was no record there.

Years later, I recalled that the record may have been "Dancing In The City" by the English duo Marshall Hain. But - even if a record was indeed confiscated - I'm not even sure it was this. Again, this could be the power of suggestion. This song didn't get that much play locally - in fact, it got very little - so why would anyone in the family think to buy it?

Let me reiterate that it's possible that the seized record was something else - or that the incident didn't take place at all, and no record was ever confiscated. If so, I don't know why I recalled such an episode. I have clear memories of some real events that others deny, but this recollection is fuzzy.

It may be the power of suggestion manifest!

"Almost Over You" by Sheena Easton

1983 / #25

Rate Your Music score: 2.84 out of 5!

"When you come back around...After painting the town...You'll see I'm almost over you..."

I warned you that there was more adult contemporary balladry coming, and you didn't believe me, did you?

Sheena Easton wasn't always known for funky stuff like "Sugar Walls." Earlier in her career, she slogged along on MOR radio everywhere. That lasted into the era in which I wrote crude Sesame Street fanfic.

For months - maybe a year - I had an elaborate storyline which I titled "The Winds Of Sesame Street." This gave us ridiculous scenarios such as Big Bird's tail getting amputated and being found floating in outer space. In this storyline, Bert was afraid of Oscar the Grouch, so Ernie hung a portrait of Oscar above Bert's bed to scare him. This fanfic exercise even drew in characters from outside the Sesame Street universe. For example, He-Man appeared and was somehow chopped up into small pieces and put back together with Scotch tape. The Quaker Oats man also showed up at some point.

That was also around the time I made up song titles like "Groverkill" and "Do You Really Want To Bert Me." A line in "Puttin' On The Ritz" was parodied as, "Tryin' hard to look like Mr. Hooper."

When Sheena released "Almost Over You", you could see right where things were headed. You guessed it! I called it "Almost Grover You."

Wait! There's more! As an ode to Sesame Street's Number Painter character - the man with suspenders and a derby hat who appeared in a series of segments in which he painted numbers on things - I made a parody of the song's chorus: "When you come back around...After Number Painting the town...You'll see I'm almost Grover you."

All of this was back when Sesame Street was still good - long before its disastrous 51st season.

Not long after all of this, Sheena realized that the next few years would not be quite as friendly to the type of adult contemporary that had filled the airwaves in the early '80s. This was much to the PMRC's chagrin.

"Lies" by the Thompson Twins

1983 / #30

Rate Your Music score: 3.25 out of 5!

"Promises are snapped in two...And words are made to bend..."

The Thompson Twins. Discuss.

"Lies" made the top 40, but I didn't hear it that much. I remember hearing it in my parents' Horizon as we tooled down the street though. But it was the video that really grabbed my attention.

I saw the video one day, and I burst out laughing! The funniest part was the Thompsons' faces flying toward the viewer as they sang the chorus. To show you how much influence music-related media had at the time, the feet moving in the foreground also inspired a school photography project.

"Lies" has rarely been heard since. That's what this lost hits blog is all about. But the song's influence just won't go away! Only a few years ago, my zine was going strong with its unbeatable formula that relied heavily on funny stories about people breaking or ruining their eyeglasses - usually on purpose. One 2017 vignette was about how a woman on a parenting blog said her daughter kept breaking her own glasses at least once per week - usually by poking the lenses out. But the daughter came up with a new strategy of grabbing the glasses by each arm and tearing them off.

The title of this piece was "Glasses are snapped in two...And words are made to bend..."

And that's no lie!

"Me Myself And I" by De La Soul

1989 / #34

Rate Your Music score: 3.92 out of 5!

I'm giving this lost hit an entry to show how we focus on singles rather than albums.

You may know that - whenever possible - I buyed actual records instead of cassettes or CD's. Good records had better sound quality - and were cheaper than CD's. You could have your cake and eat it too! I continued with this until you could buy MP3's instead. I think the last new 45 that I purchased had to have been in the mid-1990s, maybe later.

Also - whether it was a record, tape, or CD - I usually buyed singles instead of albums. Sometimes the album version of a track was better than the single mix, but this was hit-or-miss. I usually purchased the single because singles represented excitement. Some of the best music had brevity. I didn't buy music so I could analyze it.

For some acts, such as Men At Work or "Weird Al" Yankovic, we'd buy the album. But for most other performers - even some of the greats - we got the single.

From its inception until 1998, the Hot 100 was a singles chart. There was a time in its early years when the chart included a few EP's too, but that didn't last past the 1960s. Only since 1998 has the chart included LP-only cuts. But apparently, even before 1998, a single would occasionally chart even if a commercial single was not available.

That's where "Me Myself And I" comes in.

When this record appeared on American Top 40, host Shadoe Stevens said it was the first item to reach the top 40 that was not available as a commercial single. I'm not sure under what rule it charted. Was there a promotional single for radio stations? There had been a few songs that famously did not chart because they were not released as commercial singles, but I know there were promo 45's for some.

In a later AT40 installment, Shadoe corrected this information, saying "Rapper's Delight" by the Sugarhill Gang from a decade earlier was actually the first item to reach the top 40 without being sold as a commercial single. But Wikipedia says there were 7-inch pressings of this hit that are "very rare." "Rapper's Delight" was also known for the brilliant line, "I can bust you out with my super sperm."

In the 1990s, many big hits were sold as a cassette single or CD single, but not as a single record. These were still eligible to appear on the Hot 100, because there was some type of single. But the era saw many big songs excluded from the Hot 100 because they didn't have a single at all.

Long live the single!

"Don't Let Go" by Wang Chung

1984 / #38

Rate Your Music score: 3.46 out of 5!

I profiled Wang Chung once before for their lost hit "Hypnotize Me." But it really is amazing how much their minor hit "Don't Let Go" - their first chart hit ever - essentially ruled the roost for about a year in the mid-1980s, even after it faded from radio and MTV.

I'm not even sure why or how. It just did. It's as if that record just takes that time frame and smashes it right in your face. I actually remember discussing this song with someone, maybe some neighborhood pals who stopped by. I don't even recall why.

Many events of the era were somehow linked to the musical culture of the day, and "Don't Let Go" appeared to be at the heart of it all. This song was the standard by which everything else was judged. It represented an environment that sort of bobbed along for a while, died down, and resurfaced a couple more times in the ensuing decades.

In more recent years, current popular music hasn't had nearly as much influence on our society, while other media have. I had a blast in the 2010s, as I went to rallies and participated in community projects (which were quickly swatted down in the 2020s). But if you look at a Hot 100 chart from the 2010s, you'll see very little music that you ever remember hearing. Even #1 hits aren't remembered. Yet a #38 hit from 1984 is still fondly recalled even after it's been off the airwaves for 41 years.

Another amusing note about Wang Chung: "Don't Let Go" came from their album Points On The Curve, a disc that prompted a hilarious review by the Philadelphia Inquirer. The Inquirer charged that Wang Chung were "mean-spirited fops." I burst out laughing when I found this, because Wang Chung always seemed like the ultimate nice guys, and it's hard to imagine them as "mean-spirited."

"Highwire" by the Rolling Stones

1991 / #57

Rate Your Music score: 3.3 out of 5!

This song sounds like a big hit, and maybe it would have been one if not for the radio industry's political intolerance.

"Highwire" came out around the end of the disastrous 1991 Gulf War. The Stones' Keith Richards said the song was "about how you build up some shaky dictator" just to "slam them down." The song criticized the politics behind the start of the war.

The tune's antiwar stance caused it to be banned by radio stations in Salt Lake City and St. Louis. This was while radio played songs that they linked to favorable views of the war. A station in Albany, New York, even collected congratulatory letters to send to George H.W. Bush for how he carried out the conflict.

I heard the song precisely once on Cincinnati radio - as we were in the car in the parking lot of a fast food restaurant - and it's a miracle our stations played it even that much, considering how stodgy and conservative our top-rated stations already were. You can bet your bottom dollar that after the song aired once on local radio, the suits slapped it down lickety-split. But the record apparently saw more play in smaller cities, so it actually made the Gavin Report's top 40.

The ban of this record was like having the 2020s in the 1990s!