"Talk To Me" by Fiona

1985 / #64

Rate Your Music score: 3.25 out of 5!

Let's talk about MTV Top 20 Video Countdown. A weird thing, that countdown. MTV used to compile its own weekly ranking of its top 20 hottest music videos - or "video songs", as it called them. This program debuted in early 1984 and apparently ran all the way until 1998 - which seemed like a completely different world from when the show first aired. The show started in the days of 45 RPM singles and the Atari 800, and ended in the era of MP3's and the World Wide Web.

I always watched this countdown in the mid-'80s, when it was hosted by Mark Goodman. But at some point, I gave up on it, because I was hardly ever allowed to watch it anymore. That may have been for the better, because then I had more time to spend on dialup bulletin boards and road map collecting instead.

In our last entry, I made a reference to a 1985 installment of this show in which Mark wore a shirt that was so ridiculous that I couldn't contain my laughter. I said it had been posted on YouTube but later taken down. Well, guess what? It's back...

And trust me, nobody except Mark Goodman wore anything that hideous in 1985. I was around in 1985. I remember what people wore. Nobody wore anything like that. This is like when someone made a webpage about how they found a 1970s clothes catalog and thought that guys back then wore oversized orange shirts that looked like a bath towel.

I'm not going to wade through that entire episode. Not even the interview where Molly Ringwald appears to be chewing bubble gum. Since we're on the topic of Molly Ringwald, I should also mention that one of my 8th grade teachers later railed against The Breakfast Club much as she crusaded against the Benjamin Orr hit song "Stay The Night."

In that episode of MTV's countdown, Fiona's lost hit appeared at #18. I remember this tune clanking out of the boom box in the den, but I think it got more exposure on MTV. Fiona once told Dick Clark that her parents hated radio so much that they didn't let her listen to it. That's what a lot of adults thought about MTV in the mid-'80s, even though they thought radio stations that played the same music were just fine.

My folks must have really hated MTV's top 20 countdown. They tolerated it at first, but eventually, they went to great lengths to stop me from watching it. When I declared I would watch it, the resulting conversation was like the Simpsons episode where Marge tries to get cartoons banned and Bart keeps saying he's gonna relax and go watch some toonies.