When I was a kid in the 1980s (which, I now realize, was the absolute best thing to be in the 80s), I had one unadulterated conduit to the wide world of popular music: my clock radio. My parents are extremely musical, so I was well-versed in everything from Billy Joel to Gershwin to Pavarotti from birth, but there’s something unique about discovering music for yourself as a kid, without context, filter, or preamble, especially when your brain is a fresh little sponge.
So yes: my clock radio, which I received as a Christmas or birthday present in ’86 or ’87, with its friendly red digital readout and pink and teal accents, was my window on the world of pop music. I find this really weird in hindsight since we did have cable, and I did watch MTV, which was still showing videos almost all the time back then (including Thriller, which scared the absolute bejesus out of me and, come to think about it, completely explains why I feared experiencing music through my television). Also rather inexplicably, my clock radio was always tuned to Syracuse’s Y94FM, which was sort of the VH1 to 93Q’s MTV: pop music for your mom or your aunt, extremely light on Beastie Boys with only a dash of Madonna, heavy on Foreigner, Journey, and post-Go-Gos Belinda Carlisle.
This created in me an undying, unironic, and, I suspect, lifelong affection for Foreigner, Journey, and Belinda Carlisle (and Madonna, but that has less to do with my radio than with being a girl in the 80s, point blank). Those songs poured out of that radio and fueled my imagination with a beauty and earnestness that spoke directly to the heart of my seven-year-old heart: Kate, heaven is a place on earth! Don’t you ever stop believing! I want to dance with somebody, someone who loves me! Pop music in the 80s was a tsunami of rah rah life is HUGE and you can do ANYTHING! optimism that, as an adult, I now understand in a more complex and far less rosy global and political context. But as a kid, when I heard this music? I thought life was huge, I could do anything, and love was a real thing worth singing about really passionately, preferably while sporting a righteous mullet.
It’s that same sort of heedless, helpless optimism that drives crushes and first loves—disregarding snark, loving the moment, feeling big feelings and not being ashamed. This Must Be the Place is a book about growing up, and a huge part of growing up is acting like a hideous dork but feeling like liquid awesome; and to me, that phenomenon has always sounded like a slow synth intro and a full choir backing you up over the chorus.
[So, I had never seen this video before today when I found it on the YouTubes. It teaches me that mini blinds represent existential ennui, and that Foreigner needs a hug.]
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