Old Enough to Forget

In 1983 David Bowie ruled the world. After years of flirting with mainstream success, he was suddenly the flavour of the day. It was the latest strange turn from one of rock's most durable and creative voices. I'll also freely admit I was not a fan. At all. Not at first. To me he was the guy who did "Space Oddity" and that song weirded me out as a kid. I didn't like it, and thought it sounded terrible. It didn't help that when I was in my teens there was a young Bowie singing a duet with Bing Crosby on a Christmas Special where he mashed up some ridiculous counterpoint "The Little Drummer Boy." I hated it. Ick, phooey. Somehow I'd gotten it into my head that Bowie was unlistenable. He was a dinosaur who kept desperately throwing whatever he could against the wall, trying to make anything stick so that his 15 minutes would last a little longer. It didn't matter that there were quite a few of his classic songs that were pretty amazing. I had pa...

Ah, the '80s. Right about '84, things were hitting the sweet spot for me musically. I remember a buddy playing me a mixtape that had "No More Words" on it, and I asked, "Who is that?" I liked synth-pop with the big guitars and all that, but I never got around to getting this album. Of course, a couple of years later, after Top Gun came out, everyone knew "Take My Breath Away," a song that put the band in the upper echelons for a little while. Sadly, it was also a song written for the band by Giorgio Moroder, who had a killer touch with soundtracks in particular, and it pretty much overshadowed anything they did before and after. The other day I was bin rummaging, and there, in between the ever-present badly scratched Rod Stewart albums (I think people do it on purpose), was a decent-looking copy of Berlin's Love Life. "Ooooh," I said to myself. I took out the vinyl, and it was just dusty and covered in fingerprints, but otherwise look...