{"id":577,"date":"2005-08-16T15:23:52","date_gmt":"2005-08-16T22:23:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/?p=577"},"modified":"2005-08-16T15:23:52","modified_gmt":"2005-08-16T22:23:52","slug":"pop-culture-windows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/2005\/08\/16\/pop-culture-windows\/","title":{"rendered":"pop culture windows"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>This<\/a> essay popped into my head the other day. I was listening to — or rather had on in the background — a high school radio station (That is 1450 AM — which turns into a college radio station at night-time. There is a style to the whole outfit that the Entercom and Clear Channel stations lack.) The two high school djs played “I’m Too Sexy”<\/a> by Right Said Fred. When one of them asked, “Why did you play that?”, the other answered “To show that such a thing was popular at one time.” (I would mention that there is a godawful hip-hop song popular right now — I think by R Kelly but a google search isn’t showing anything up — that’s based upon sexual innuendoes around the kitchen table — and it rhymes potato with tomato. Life meanders forward; history is prolouge; some mendacities of pop culture never change.)<\/p>\n

This one hit wonder is completely outside of these teenagers’ pop cultural purview. For me, it is just barely inside it. I remember a slightly sophisticated fellow student having a conversation with the (elementary school) teacher about the song, and either moral decay or changing standards of acceptability.<\/p>\n

Later, I was in a line at Fred Meyers. The cashier was having trouble with the code for produce, and had to ask either a fellow worker or the supervisor. He gave the answer twice. Then he started chiming in some other numbers. “8675309<\/a>.” The young clerk did not understand the reference. (And yet… Tommy Tutone lives right here in Portland!) [Everything vanishes for me. Various games of Trivial Pursuit show me not knowing things that it seems that I should know, and knowing things that it seems I should not know.]<\/p>\n

As for Alf and Tom Cruise, I saw the Alf parody first — and no doubt did not make the connection when it was first run. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen the movie “Risky Business”, nor do I have any reason to want to. Today’s teenagers — Alf not being a part of their pop cultural purview — may turn to the Homer Simpson parody when they hear the Bob Segar song. (Perhaps. I can’t really make heads or tails of how The Simpsons passes through its second run syndication… though, the episode in question comes from the show’s golden period when less surreality abounded.)<\/p>\n

Just leave the high school djs with their “Vote for Pedro” t-shirts, and move on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This essay popped into my head the other day. I was listening to — or rather had on in the background — a high school radio station (That is 1450 AM — which turns into a college radio station at night-time. There is a style to the whole outfit that the Entercom and Clear Channel […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=577"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/577\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}