‘Teen Wolf’s’ Tyler Posey Brings a-ha’s 80s Hit ‘Take On Me’ Back to Life
Remember that classic 80s track “Take On Me” by the Norwegian band a-ha? Well, it has become a popular song for a Lip Sync Battle. Recently 24-year-old Tyler Posey, star of MTV’s Teen Wolf, used the track for his Spike TV Lip Sync Battle performance. Posey takes his best shot sporting the leather motorcycle jacket similar to the one in the original music video for “Take On Me.” He also tried to pull off...
15 on 45: Fifteen Questions about My Forgotten 45 Collection
My brother Matt recently sent me a text: “Found the old records!” And accompanying this joyous announcement was a picture of my old 45 record of Eddie Money’s “Take Me Home Tonight.” A little context: Matt had purchased a record player, but he had no actual records to play on it. So he Indiana-Jones-ed our parents’ basement, looking for the collection of 45s I had back in high school. The search seemed fruitless, until my dad...
Q&A with Dave Kinzer, Author of “The 80s Music Compendium”
I just had the pleasure of reading the new book by Dave Kinzer, “The 80s Music Compendium” that released in paperback this week (Sept 13). Dave Kinzer, a music teacher, sought to find new ways to teach music structure and theory to students in a way that would hold their interest longer than say Bach. As an avid fan of 80s music, he turned to the treasure trove that is the catalog of Hot 100 hit songs from the 80s. He...
K-tel Records
Ask me what some of my favorite albums are and you’ll get a short list of ones that I would make it to the desert island with me – Tattoo You by The Rolling Stones, Beauty and the Beat by The Go-Go’s, Kings of the Wild Frontier by Adam and the Ants. I know these records up and down, and I never get tired of them. But ask me about important records, ones that take me back to a time and a place, ones where when I see the cover of them a...
Obscur-Eighties, Vol. 1
It’s simple math. A decade is made up of 520 weeks, right? And for every one of those weeks, Billboard puts out a “Hot 100” list, detailing the top one hundred songs of those seven days. Now, granted, a hundred new songs don’t appear every week. (Just last year, Imagine Dragons’ “Radioactive,” for example, ended a record-breaking eighty-seven weeks on the Hot 100.) Still, if I can get technical here, a LOT of songs cycle through those...
