NEED YOU STRONGER DON'T CHANGE

Saturday has rolled around once more. Amazing how that happens. Like clockwork. For those of you new to the blogging world, this is the day where more people are actually doing something. They are not writing blogs and/or reading them. That opens up all sorts of freedom to those who choose to write blogs over the weekend. Your audience is fairly limited, so you can really go for it. Speak your mind. Say what you need to say. Go ahead... unburden yourself.

As for me, today is the day where I share music with the masses that hop, skip, jump, or accidentally fall down the rabbit hole, and end up at this blog. Wheeee. I even have some vague format for this day. However, I can and do break my own rules. Nothing is written in stone here. Here's the overall deal: I choose one song that is inspirational to me right now in this moment. Then, I choose one artist or band from the 80s that rocked MTV. I find it disturbing that MTV really doesn't play music anymore. The M in the TV is for Music. It is not for reality TV or anything else. That is just dumb. Back in the 80s, it was pretty much all videos all the time. It was awesome. So, we are time traveling to revisit some of that incredible amazingness, just to see what these groundbreaking artists did with this new form of musical expression. Some of them just used vids of themselves in concert. For the most part, we won't be looking at that. That is not a creative form of expression peeps!

Now, that we have the whole "what this thing is about" ironed out, let's move on to my inspirational song for today. This is gonna be a strange one. Usually the song just comes to me. In this case, it was a feeling. I have been feeling lousy and that ticks me off, so I wanted a kick some butt sort of song. Mostly I wanted to be Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I go through these phases. No, I pretty much always want to be Buffy. I just don't talk about it. So, I cruised through youtube watching Buffy videos until I found one that was sufficiently down and dirty that it worked for me. So, here we go... Don't forget to turn off my music player at the botttom of the page.





Okay, now that I am all warm and gooey from the inside out, we can move on to the rest of our Inspirational Music Marathon. Let me just towel off. That was quite a workout. And I need a drink. Be right back and then we can proceed. Is anyone else sweating? It is HOT in here.

Okay, I am back. It didn't occur to me until last night that I had not even thought about the 80s artist that I was going to feature today. Rutro. That is bad. I usually have a handle on this much sooner. However, there are so many to choose from that it really is not tough. My friend Megan came to mind ~ again ~ once I decided on... wait for it... INXS. I will take this moment to strongly encourage new readers, or old readers who missed the blog on Megan, and her stellar musical knowledge, to go back to this blog and read it. In addition to being informative, it cracks me up.

Megan was the first person to introduce me to INXS. We listened to Shabooh Shoobah and Listen Like Thieves regularly as we drove around town. She might have had some of their other records, too, but those are the ones that come to mind. At the time, that was considered to be somewhat alternative or new wave. It wasn't getting any radio play in the US. I still don't know how Megan ran them down. However, she listened to a LOT of music that was foreign to my ears, but was always super cool.

The first song that introduced most people to INXS (here in the US) was What You Need. They followed that up with what has to be one of the best records of all time, in my opinion: KICK. I confess I did do some reading about this, but only because I was curious! I normally do no research on these things and rely strictly on my memory. If I am wrong, I really don't care. I am not declaring myself to be an expert on this subject. Apparently the record label didn't want to release KICK and fought them all the way down the line. The plan with KICK was to have every song on it be so good that it could be released as a single. In my opinion, they succeeded. However, Atlantic Records had other ideas...

They hated it, absolutely hated it. They said there was no way they could get this music on rock radio. They said it was suited for black radio, but they didn't want to promote it that way. The president of the label told me that he'd give us $1 million to go back to Australia and make another album.
—Chris Murphy, manager

Well, the album got made despite Atlantic's idiocy. I am sure that they claimed all the glory after it was such a resounding success. Ah well. That is just the way it goes. I played KICK so often that I think I wore the music right off of the tape. It was a freaking awesome record. I call them all records, no matter what form you buy them in. They are still records. Saves confusion. In this case, it was a cassette.

KICK was such an amazing record that the next one must have felt overwhelming. INXS went on to release four more records before lead singer, Michael Hutchence died. None of the records reached the level of success that KICK garnered. The last was aptly titled ELEGANTLY WASTED. It was how I felt about Michael's death when I heard about it: all of that talent and charisma just gone. Poof.

I had a very difficult time just choosing one video from KICK. It was so much fun just watching them. However, I wanted you to see one of the videos pre-KICK, so that you could see the difference. And I do take a bit of divine pleasure, once again, in saying to those of you who missed MTV when it was actually good, you really missed something GOOD. Thank the powers at be for youtube. Where would we be without youtube???? I really do think that they have laced youtube with crack. I am becoming more certain by the day...

This is Need You Tonight. It was one of SEVEN songs that charted on this amazing album... KICK.




Well, that was all kinds of fun for me, and brought back lots of really great memories. I hope that you enjoyed a similar walk down memory lane, or found a brand new path full of musical joy!


image found at www.weheartit.com