Word: 80s
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...terrible, institutionalized temptation that will be installed if Kevorkianism becomes legal. I knew a man who was broke and trying to send his children through college, but was heir to his uncle's modest fortune. The uncle, amiably gaga and perversely vigorous, lived on and on, through his 80s, into his 90s. His round-the-clock medical care ate through the money. My friend gnashed his teeth and lived on baked beans. How he longed to put in a call to Dr. Jack...
...John Hughes movies defined growing up in the '80s, and the pre-teen fantasies of many of today's adolescents involved falling in love to songs like O.M.D.'s "If You Leave". And the recent '80s revival shows that it's apparently not just my blocking group friends who are obsessed with John Cusack holding up that boombox in Say Anything. Plus, every generation wants to take on the songs they grew up with. Reasons, reasons, reasons. Do they merit a full album of covers of teen movie themes from the '80s...
Sadly enough, the answer in this case has to be `no'. In Their Eyes: '90s Teen Bands Vs. '80s Teen Movies presents 15 relatively unknown bands performing songs from the soundtracks of great John Hughes movies (for those not in the know, they are Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller's Day Off--whew), and other defining '80s teen movies like Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Say Anything. The gimmick here is that all the bands are comprised of teenagers, representing the sway these movies hold on today's adolescents. Considering the band...
...Forget About Me)," for example, preserves the source's arrangement down to the deep voices and the "hey hey hey hey" that opens the song, but loses its longing tone. If you ignored the liner notes, you might think you were hearing a bootleg recording of '80s cover bands: few of the bands display any trace of '90s influence, and none dares to be snarky or ironic. Yet in playing it straight, they can't seem to match, let alone outdo, the original levels of emotion...
...reach for my CD collection and look for the originals. If the bands' aim was exposure, as the addresses of their record companies in the liner notes seems to indicate, a better strategy might have been to distinguish themselves and not parrot the originals--the ready-made market for '80s nostalgia would mean they would have gotten heard anyway. As it stands, however, In Their Eyes comes across as an album trying to ride on the coattails of the '80s revival. Just like many of the original singers faded away with the passing of the decade, many of these bands...