The Urgh War Continued – Banned From YouTube and losing my mind
A few weeks ago I wrote a post detailing how I got myself banned from YouTube because I uploaded (in clip form) the film Urgh! A Music War in upscaled 4K to YouTube. That post was mostly just a rant about the silliness of the situation. At the time I really wasn’t that upset that I lost my channel, I was more just annoyed that it happened in the first place. I made a dummy new account and didn’t think much of it for a while.
Well, things have changed.
MTV’s Top 100 of 1985, a look back (Part 10)
Here we are, the top 10 videos of 1985.
A lot of them aren’t very good.
It’s weird. This countdown is full of classic tunes that are still played to death on the radio, but while many of the songs that make up the top 10 have stayed in the public consciousness in the years that followed, it hasn’t always been for the right reasons. The low points here are some of the most maligned, poorly-aged songs of the decade. Not only bad, but textbook examples of all the worst aspects of 80s music, both in terms of music and lyrics. When people were throwing out their 80s records and embracing grunge and indie music in the 90s, these were the records they shoveled off to CD Warehouse first.
But while many of these tracks aren’t the best 80s songs, they’re all the most 80s songs. These are the tracks that exemplified where music was in 1985, and where pop would go in the next few years. You might not like all of these songs, but if you were there in 1985, you’d have to agree that this top 10 is pretty indicative of what that year was like, for better or worse. Continue reading
The commercials of MTV’s 1985 Top 100 Countdown
Truth be told, I knew what most of MTV’s top 100 videos of 1985 were before I even sat down to watch the eight-plus hours recording that was uploaded to the Internet Archive earlier this year. Bootlegs of this specific countdown have been circulating for a while, and you could find lists of it online no problem at all. Based on those lists, you could easily watch over 90 of the videos on YouTube at anytime, and with much better video and sound quality as well.
But that’s not fun at all! Because while it’s great to sit down and revisit some classic 80s tunes, the real joy of watching the original broadcast of the countdown isn’t just in the music videos, it’s in everything that surrounded it. Continue reading
MTV’s Top 100 of 1985, a look back (Part 9)
Okay so…what had happened was…
I totally had intentions of finishing this feature in a timely matter. I actually wrote 95% of it before I even published the first part, just to give myself enough of a head start. But the “I’ll write something funny to distract myself from the hell of 2020” mood I was in when I started this slowly morphed into a far less productive “everything is shit and I just wanna die” mood, and it’s really hard to write quips about “Sussudio’ when you’re in that headspace.
But I vowed to get this done by the year end and dammit that’s going to happen! So buckle up for the first half of the Top 20! We were already into the serious shit on the countdown, but things get real here. Save for one forgotten track by an artist whose already had one other forgotten track on this countdown, everything here is a straight-up classic. Even the bad songs. We’re in the timeless section now. Right now, at the very second you’re reading this, every song on this countdown is being played on the radio somewhere.
No matter how hard we want to get away from “Sussudio,” we just can’t I’m sorry. Continue reading
MTV’s Top 100 of 1985, a look back (Part 8)
We’re really getting 80s up in this top ten countdown from 1985. There are better sections of the countdown. There are worst sections of the countdown, but this one is the most 80s yet. And it’s 80s in an incredibly diverse (yet white) way, with new wave, pop, synthpop, hard rock, power ballads, heartland rock, and dance music all managing to fit their way in. And its almost all recognizable now too. I only didn’t know of two songs out of this set of ten, and one I dug so much that I went out and bought more albums by the artist.
The other was by Night Ranger. Continue reading
MTV’s Top 100 of 1985, a look back (Part 7)
The next section of the MTV’s Top 100 of 1985 might be the best. There are a couple stinkers here (including one that’s absolutely horrendous) but they’re more than outshined by the bangers, the classics, the timeless tunes that have held up better than most of the songs that have preceded them on this list. We were in the big leagues already, but now we’re reaching the all-star game. Nearly every song from this point on is on a “Best of the 80s” playlist or CD somewhere.
There’s also a song by The Firm but hey they can’t all be winners.
MTV’s Top 100 of 1985, a look back (Part 6)
We’ve crossed the halfway point in the countdown. From this point on, nearly all the names are recognizable and the songs still remembered to this day (with a couple very notable exceptions). One-hit wonders and flashes in the pan still make their appearances, but only with massive hits that chart among the biggest of the decade. We’ve moved past semi-hits like “Obsession” by Animotion. We’re in the big leagues now. The stars are megastars, the failures are megafailures, the great songs are fantastic, and the bad songs are absolutely horrible.
A response to lies and nonsense said by Doug TenNapel
Doug TenNapel (creator of Earthworm Jim and other mediocre-to-bad video games) and Ethan Nicolle (who cares) are mad at me. I wrote a blog post and a twitter thread about their hateful little podcast with Mike Nelson, and Mike bailed on them. I also wrote some more Twitter threads highlighting the shitty things they say about Black Lives Matter, wearing masks, women, gay people, minorities, you name it. I suggest you read all of them.
How do I know they’re mad at me? Because they returned to their silly little podcast this week, and dedicated a good amount of it to me and the fallout I caused.
A lot of it is just rambling whiny bullshit about being canceled (also known as “facing consequences for doing bad things”.) But occasionally they attack me directly, often under false pretenses. I would like to take this time to address those accusations.
They can keep lying about me. I can keep telling the truth about them.
MTV’s Top 100 of 1985, a look back (Part 5)
Now at the halfway point of the Top 100, we come to what might be its most drastically fragmented section yet. Synthpop, 80s rock, 70s leftovers, bubblegum pop, bar rock, all that and more. It’s really a testament to just how many sounds were fighting for dominance at the time, with synthpop beginning to fall from cultural relevance, hair metal not yet finding its audience, and Michael Jackson taking the year off, it seemed that anyone and everyone could score a hit, genre be damned. While not all of the tracks here have aged well (or were even all that great at the time) they certainly get points for diversity, another reason why 1985 was so great for music.
MTV’s Top 100 of 1985, a look back (Part 4)
As bad as the last set of videos was for new-and-upcoming acts, this section is even worse. Over half of the 10 videos here are from artists who first established themselves in the 1970s or 1960s. There are only two new artists in this section, and neither ever scored another hit.
But even some of the more “classic” acts don’t fair all that well here, with some terrible tracks that signaled the beginning of the end of their careers. There’s more than one (bad) swan song here. With so many prominent artists of decades past churning out some of the crap you see in this section, it’s no wonder that hair metal would begin to take over the charts in just a few months. It was time for a change.
Our number 69 (nice) artist certainly knew that.