"Go For Soda" by Kim Mitchell

1985 / #86

Rate Your Music score: 3.11 out of 5!

The man from Sarnia, Ontario, gave us this lost hit, which is about one of the strangest topics of any record ever to chart.

This song is about how if you've had a long day and you find yourself in any sort of disagreement, and you feel like angrily chugging beer and smoking cigarettes, you should drink soft drinks instead. To drive home this point, the video features Kim jumping out of a TV screen and kicking a cigarette out of an ashtray.

Remember, this song was from 40 years ago, so there were still fresh memories of soft drinks being better than they are now. The song was popular around the time most such products - at least those sold in the U.S. - added more weird additives. These ingredients are the main reason these products aren't as good as they once were. Other viands have also acquired more strange additives since then - bubble gum being another prime example. As a connoisseur of soft drinks, I've noticed that the major brands were much better before the mid-'80s. Makers of these products seemed to be admitting as much during the brief "throwback" craze of several years ago, when they sold varieties of sodas that were promoted as using real sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup, a substitute that did not appear until the 1980s. They even used 1970s logos. Supposedly, they still sell this line of bevs, but you can't get them around here anymore (of course).

In fact, it is reported that 1985 - the very year "Go For Soda" charted - was coincidentally the exact same year the last major soft drinks sold in the U.S. switched away from real sugar. And it was the year of the New Coke debacle. It was also around the time RC ran a commercial where the KGB shows up at a get-together where people are guzzling RC, and that's the end of it...

I goed for the soda. I think Kim's tune appeared on MTV's top 20 countdown that aired on Friday nights. I remember watching this show and smuggling soft drinks and Fritos in from the kitchen, which prompted the oldsters to hide the bottle cap opener. I also remember a 1985 episode of this countdown in which host Mark Goodman wore a shirt that looked so ridiculous that I burst out laughing. That very episode later showed up on YouTube, but it's gone now.

And I was in 7th grade in 1985-86. That was when soda sales saw a spike locally because our water system got so contaminated. It's like how water in the 1890s wasn't safe to drink so people drank a lot more beer. On the day our water crisis began, they let us out of school early, and a kid from school threw my bookbag onto U.S. 27 in the rain and a truck ran over it.

The mid-1980s were pivotal in soft drink history!