"The Love Parade" by the Dream Academy

1986 / #36

Rate Your Music score: 3.51 out of 5!

This is one of these songs that always comes up in discussions about lost hits. But everyone always thinks it was the Thompson Twins.

I heard this song some back in my day. Around the time it was popular, we went on a family vacation to Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., in which people kept farting. As we were visiting one of the Smithsonian museums, someone cracked a silent-but-deadly, and my mom declared, "It smells like somebody has a load in their pants!" This was also the trip where we had a reservation at a Holiday Inn, but when we got there, we found that it had been converted into an Imperial 400 Motor Inn. I remember someone listening to "The Love Parade" on the jukebox at a Pizza Hut in northern Virginia. They also played "Sex As A Weapon" by Pat Benatar, now also a lost hit.

When 8th grade started, I wrote about this trip for my "what I did over the summer" report that I had to read in front of the class. I think I mentioned all the flatulence and how someone put a whole roll of toilet paper in the toilet at Kentucky Fried Chicken.

I actually remember more about the Pizza Hut than you might expect, considering it was 39 years ago. I have surprisingly clear memories of the meals on that trip, for some reason. Most restaurant visits saw frustrated parents yelling at unruly children. Also, when we visited relatives near Philadelphia, my aunt said there was a burger place nearby called Charburger that had recently burned down: "So Charburger is now charred."

I always thought the first few notes of "The Love Parade" sounded strikingly similar to the beginning of some TV commercial at the time for an over-the-counter acne treatment. I don't think it was the Oxy ad where the guy with the deep voice said, "Zit, this is it!" I always called that guy the Oxy Moron, because when I first heard the word oxymoron, I thought of those ads.

This also brings to mind how nobody used those round acne pads because they smelled so bad. The smell would give you a headache for the rest of the day, so it was considered better to just live with the consequences of going without. I grew up in that era, and there were lots of products for my age group that just seemed idiotic beyond belief. It's nothing like now, of course, but it was pretty bad.

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