15. Cargo by Men at Work

 15. Cargo by Men at Work

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqYug49O7xA&list=OLAK5uy_kq7QCVIo2veRrifljkVJ12GVNPt238wqc

As good as Business as Usual was, I rate Cargo just a tiny bit ahead of it--mostly because of the song "Overkill," which came in at #18 on my Top 200 list. The entire album, but particularly "Overkill" is actually a pretty good summation of the range of emotions I felt during my senior year of high school. It was one of my Dave Edmund's Mood records that I turned to repeatedly during my senior year, and even through the entirety of The Great Depression. While there are some albums on this list that I liked to listen to while I worked out lifting weights and jumping rope in the basement, this is an after-workout album that I found was best listened to after a jogging workout that consisted mainly of running around the outside streets of Arimo at least once (during the winter) or running up and down the gravel Arkansas road when the weather got better. I'd come home exhausted, hit the shower, and then lay on the bed and listen to this album and get lost in my thoughts. That isn't to say that there aren't songs on the album worthy of placement on a workout playlist. If I'd had a Walkman during my senior year, I definitely would have had a running tape with "Upstairs In My House," "High Wire," "I Like To," and "No Restrictions" on it. But it's the slow songs on this tape that were my favorite to listen to while I was in my Dave Edmund's Moodiness. "Overkill," "No Sign of Yesterday," "It's a Mistake," and "Blue for You," were the songs that had the most meaning for me during my last year of high school. 

As was the case with Business as Usual, I think Cargo should have been released as a double album. Since the album's release in April of 1983, the band released some other songs that were written around the same time as Cargo and that have that Men at Work sound that I love so much (the sound of the band before their third album). The first four are included on the 2003 remastered version of Cargo, and they are all quite good and worthy of being included on the original album. Three of them were B-sides to the four singles that got released from the album.

Shintaro

https://youtu.be/t4fwy7QUKkI

Till the Money Runs Out

https://youtu.be/zuIGE_W0y8o

Fallin' Down

https://youtu.be/uZJYS_QnZOg

The Longest Night

https://youtu.be/lLa0rlhOTvw

There are also the following additional songs that I think could have been released on a second Cargo album. 

Coldfinger

https://youtu.be/kriOmLagNHA

Stimulation (Feeling So Good)

https://youtu.be/ZRPb-NhW058

And I'm not sure if this last one is album-worthy, but they played it a lot in their live shows, and the video is worth watching if for no other reason than you get to see Collin dance wildly and jump around the stage like a kangaroo. 

Mr. Entertainer

https://youtu.be/kEEWlGvTC5A

I can't find any other rare, unreleased songs from Men at Work during this time period prior to the release of their third album, so I guess that second record on the Cargo double-album would have been short a few songs. Seven songs just doesn't seem to be long enough for an entire album. Still, I'd rather listen to these "throwaway" Cargo songs than most of the songs on Two Hearts. 

And that concludes my back-to-back Men at Work album entries. They were one of the most important bands to me during my high school years, and I still enjoy listening to their songs today--especially when I get in a Dave Edmunds Mood. And maybe (just maybe) I'll go buy myself a pair of running shoes and some sweats and put together a Men at Work playlist that will help me get back into some kind of shape where running a mile or two around Arimo won't seem to be an unachievable feat anymore. If I do end up running around Arimo again, I will be running it in the dark, because I learned back in 1983 that's the time when there are pretty lights that nullify the night as ghosts appear and fade away.

Nardo

16. Business as Usual by Men at Work

16. Business as Usual by Men at Work

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SECVGN4Bsgg&list=OLAK5uy_mzG5DvQXjmQHAyFZ4RSnheGFVSwvS55GQ

Fun Fact: The album cover for the Australian release of this album was black and white. (Nice factoid. THANKS!)

This album is so good it really should have been two albums. And in fact, it kind of was. 

First, there was the album that got released in the U.S. in June of 1982 right in the middle of my obsession with the Paul Hogan Show and right before Randy came to spend his senior year at Marsh Valley High School. Randy has always been a big influence on my musical tastes, but I was already hooked on this album before we ever listened to it together. And we did like these songs a lot. I remember once he explained to me how Colin Hay made his voice do that rapid modulation thing. Also, I remember singing along to "Be Good Johnny" with Randy in the old truck in the middle of winter as we were feeding cows. Randy especially liked the verse that went:

Gonna play football this year, Johnny?

Nah.

Oh, must be gonna play cricket this year then are ya, Johnny?

Nah. Nah. Nah.

Ha. Boy, you sure are a funny kid, Johnny. But I like you! So tell me, what kind of boy are ya, Johnny.

I listened to this album so much during my junior and senior year of high school that I'm surprised that the tape didn't disintegrate. Of course, since I didn't have a tape player in any of the vehicles or a Walkman, listening to it was confined to my bedroom in the basement. But I'd listen to it while getting ready for school in the morning by taking the tape player into the bathroom. And I'd listen to it while lifting weights or just laying on the bed or doing math homework at my particle board desk that I'd built with my own two hands from a kit that I'd received as a Christmas gift in middle school. Is is possible to do your best at your math homework assignments while listening to Men at Work? No. It isn't. But that didn't stop me from doing it anyway. 

Also, remember how we had to do all that scripture reading in seminary in order to get a good grade? Well, in 1982 I discovered that it is definitely possible to read the scriptures while listening to Men at Work--especially if you have to basically read the entire semester's reading assignment in the next three days or you'll flunk the class. Of course, it was a bit strange later on in seminary when I was asked to read a verse and all I wanted to say was, "I went to the man. I told him a robot was what I am. But he just smiled, said I was a fractious child."

So that was the first album. Now for the second album.

In the HondoJoe write-up of this album, it was already pointed out that there were three other songs released as B-sides to singles from this album. And I agree that all three of them would be worthy of inclusion on the original album. Those songs are:

Anyone For Tennis

https://youtu.be/ZyOWkKTwIdw 

Crazy

https://youtu.be/nTK4S9gAEdE 

F-19

https://youtu.be/x_z1Ye-yd4Q

But there were other songs by Men at Work that were performed before their second album Cargo was released that were not included on Cargo, which I think makes them fair game as possible additions to a second Business as Usual album. Here are my top contenders.

The Ways of the Broken Hearted

https://youtu.be/YbPVoCJvbW0

Keypunch Operator

https://youtu.be/7lClxIxcOSE

https://youtu.be/yaHxVUbkSdw

Down Under (an early version of the song with extra reggae)

https://youtu.be/QKKy3lpJXL8

I Don't Understand

https://youtu.be/tOnYQNIC4UY 

Coin in the Slot

https://youtu.be/ovihEDSvntg

https://youtu.be/fmYHRQk0DrI

Don't Preach to Me

https://youtu.be/yaQthOd6eLM

I Changed My Mind

https://youtu.be/zunM-WI5mHQ

Okay, maybe not all of these are the same caliber of the songs on the first Business as Usual album. And maybe all of them weren't written before the album was released. (I couldn't find the info for all of the songs on when they were written.) But they are lots of fun to listen to, as they give you (me?) the pleasure of listening to new music while, at the same time, taking you (me?) back to the good old days of high adventure camping in the summer and snowmobile excursions to the Big Onion in the winter. And how many songs can do that anymore?

Well, I suppose the answer to that question would be "at least seven." I guess listening to Business as Usual didn't keep me from learning math after all! Sure it isn't really advanced math. But it's enough for me to get a job as a keypunch operator.

Nardo

17. Album by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts

 17. Album by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9kZWlIgKyU&list=OLAK5uy_lfFkmAv1pOn5HklZTfRjqW8HxQTG9yxdA&index=1

In the July of 1983, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts released their third album titled...wait for it..., "Album." The song "Fake Friends" was the first single released from Album, which hardly broke the Top 40 list, followed by the cover of "Everyday People," which again, barely made it into the Top 40. It had to have been disappointing for Jett and the band, considering that their previous album had the number one song on the charts for seven weeks in a row with their cover of "I Love Rock and Roll," as well as a top-ten charting cover of "Crimson and Clover." While "The French Song" got a little airplay, and MTV showed the video a few times, since the song was about having a threesome, and since the chorus that sings about having the threesome is in French, it just wasn't the kind of song that could get onto the charts in 1983 America. As far as album sales go, Album reached only as high as #20 on the 1983 album charts. And frankly, I think it got that high in part due the excellent album cover. The '80s hair, the black leather outfit, the red Converse sneakers (Hondo had a pair of red sneakers in elementary school!), the sexy pout while playing the guitar and leaping into the air with a double knee bend, all against a bright yellow backdrop--I mean, damn! That cover really pops!

I don't recall ever playing "Fake Friends" during a school dance, nor do I have any memories of any songs on this album being related to my summer lifeguarding gig. Truth be told, I basically ignored this album when it came out. So why is it ranked so high on my list?

Fast forward from senior year high school to my second year of work at BYU-Idaho. The school had finished building it's new conference center / indoor gym that featured a large indoor elevated running track that wrapped around the upper story of the gym. (8 laps equaled one mile.) It was about that time that my boss called me into his office and said some things about my work that basically made me feel like all the hard work I had put in during the previous months of working 70-80 hour work weeks had been a waste and that I was not appreciated or valued by anyone at the university. This was also around the time when I was seeing a doctor about being pre-diabetic, and he wanted me to start working out every day, which was something I had avoided doing because of my long work hours. 

Anyway, I spent about a week being super-depressed about all of this. I had completely lost my mojo, and I didn't know if I'd even get it back again. But then one day I felt that spark of rebellion that I'd had back in my high school years--that I-don't-give-a-damn-anymore attitude--and I decided that it was time to get my mojo back. So I decided I was going back to a 40-hour work week, and I got some running shoes and a new iPod and earphones, and I scoured the Apple Music playlists for some running music. When I came across the "Fake Friends" song, I thought it was a perfect fit for my playlist, so I checked out some of the other songs on the album and realized that I'd hit pay dirt. For $9.99 I could get 16 songs that were not only runnable (except for "Why Can't We Be Happy") but also had enough go-to-hell attitude to keep me inspired to keep running as long as they were playing. So I committed to an everyday workout routine of weightlifting and running around that elevated track for every day Monday-Saturday for at least an hour. And Album was the album that I listened to the most as I did that. It is the album that helped me get my mojo back and get me into arguably the best physical shape of my life--even better than when I was training to run marathons. The 1980s sound of driving guitars, the triple-extra-naughty lyrics, the don't-give-a-damn-bout-my-bad-reputation attitude--they all combined to make it a supremely listenable workout album as I jogged lap after lap and did push-up after push-up between miles.

Speaking of extra-naughty lyrics, along with my previous warning about "The French Song," please don't listen to the cover of the Rolling Stones' "Star Star" while you're around the wife and kids, unless you think they'd like to hear the word "starfucker" 62 times. I'm guessing they wouldn't. Also, be aware that "Coney Island Whitefish" has some awesome lyrics--especially if you think about your dumbass boss while you sing along to them--but I don't think you'd want the little ones to incorporate "Scumbag" into their vocabulary just yet.

Oh, and one more warning. The song "Locked Groove" is a 3 minute and 47 second song that you can basically stop listening to after the first minute, because the rest of the song is the same loop played over and over and over. See, when Joan released "Fake Friends" as a single, she put "Nitetime" on the B-side with a locked groove at the end of the song. That meant that if a restaurant put "Fake Friends" into the jukebox, some kid who was in the know would play the B-side of "Nitetime," and at the end of the song, it would just keep playing that loop over and over until the record was "manually rejected." So the people listening to the song would have to listen to that annoying loop for a while before they'd get so upset that they'd complain to the manager, who would then have to figure out how to get into the jukebox and stop the record from playing. And all the time this was happening, the kids who had selected the song would sit there and laugh at how the song was driving everyone nuts. Now, if I'd been in the know back when that song came out, I would have played "Nitetime" on every damn jukebox I came across. Yep. I was that kind of kid. And pulling off that giant practical joke is one more reason why I love Joan Jett. 

Now, on a personal note, the song "Fake Friends" became especially meaningful to me as I reclaimed my mojo. It became even more meaningful about a year later when I ended up getting fired from BYU-Idaho. I do have about six people in Rexburg that I still consider to be genuine friends, but the rest of the campus, especially all of the administrators and faculty and local church leaders that repeatedly said how much they loved me and appreciated me and cared about me, were nothing more than fake friends. They were, in fact, whited sepulchres. So in the end, the one revelation I took from my time at BYU-Idaho--a truth I discovered in the hardest way possible--is that you've really got nothing to lose when you lose fake friends...except for your job. 

Nardo

18. Cosmic Thing by The B-52s

 18. Cosmic Thing by The B-52s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axyFMQUFASA&list=OLAK5uy_lCiIAxZkSeKCFtWxrukxbkgDk87CEUKss

Wanna party like it's 1989? Then you're gonna need this album, not only because the songs put you in a party mood, but also because the album cover looks like a party decoration.

The instrumental "Follow Your Bliss" is the only song you really couldn't dance to, unless you're keen to slow dance, in which case it might suffice. It's the last song on the album, so I look at it as the music that you play at the end of the party when everyone is exhausted and there's nothing left to do but clean up and go to sleep.

Obviously, the biggest hit off this album was "Love Shack," which was written in homage to the little cabin in Georgia in which the group wrote "Rock Lobster," which happened to be the biggest hit from their 1979 debut album, which also happened to be the song that got John Lennon wanting to write music again, which happened to lead to his final album, Double Fantasy. (Nice factoid. THANKS!)

Having already been a fan of The B-52s and owning their first two albums, it wasn't a hard sell to get me to buy this album when it came out during the summer of '89, even though money was tight during that summer. See, that was the summer that Julie spent getting pregnanter and pregnanter, and with no air conditioning in the Standrod House, she holed up for a number of weeks at her parent's house just trying to stay cool and keep food down. I was taking summer courses at ISU with Hondo and trying to work enough side jobs to pay the bills. Then Erik was born in September, and money got even tighter. The only way we survived was that we were living rent free in the Standrod House. Otherwise, I would have had to drop out of school and work full time just to keep the kid in diapers. Fortunately, we were able to scrape by, so I was able to stay in school long enough to graduate and get my first teaching gig at Irving Jr. High. And this album was one that I listened to a lot whenever I was working in my classroom. We even had the 7th grade kids dance in the hall to "Love Shack" once in a while. Also, during this time Julie went back to school and started her job as a nurse, which left me to do a lot of baby tending, which meant lots of trips to the zoo and walks with the stroller around downtown Pocatello. So this album is part of the soundtrack to those early years of marriage and family building in Pocatello--years that were really hard at the time, especially financially. But now I look back on them with much more fondness than they probably deserve. But then again, how can you not have positive memories when the ultimate '80s (and '90s) party album is playing?!

Nardo

19. Musical Bar-B-Que by Space Ghost, Zorak, and Brak

 19. Musical Bar-B-Que by Space Ghost, Zorak, and Brak

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNSGRXF51dE&list=PLAC1DE8344E299852&index=1

Top-Notch Tracks: "It Smells Like Cartoon Planet," "I Love You Baby," "Don't Touch Me," "I Love Beans," "I Love Almost Everybody," "Oh Fun Key Bay Bee," "Hoodliehoo," "Put Your Socks On Mama," "Highway 40 Unplugged"

Album Depth: "Zingor," "Ordinary Guy," "Minkey Boodle," "Everybody Needs Lovin'," "What Day Is It?" "The River," "Crazy Lovesick Fool," "The Water Song," "It Stunk," "De Der Down," 

Weak Links: "The Cartoon Planet Story," "The Song That Never Ends," "Everybody Wants to Be Space Ghost," "Ramblin' and Wanderin'" "Don't Send in the Clowns," "Bye-Bye, Goodbye Everybody"

Stand-Out Lyrics: "It smells like--Asparagus and Cabbage! It smells like--Boxer Shorts! Is smells like--Ahhhhh! It smells like Cartoon Planet, Hoowee!" -- It Smells Like Cartoon Planet

"Somebody left the cake out in the rain. Oh, nooo! I was gonna eat that cake. But now it's all wet, and I don't think I want any!" -- I Love You Baby

"I've got ants in my pants as I do the mating dance for Zingor, Zingor, Zingor." -- Zingor

"Our ancient love will survive the scourge of mankind and evolution." -- Zingor

"Don't touch me!" -- Don't Touch Me

"Wake up in the mornin' and tinkleedoo. Take a hot shower. Watch the news! Then it's eggs over easy on the greasy side. Oh, yeah, I'm just an ordinary guy." -- Ordinary Guy

"Work day's over and I got me a date with a big fat piece of pie! I sit around thinking what a good boy am I. But hey, I'm just an ordinary guy. Just an average superhero kinda guy. I'm just an extra ordinary guy!" -- Ordinary Guy

"Nobody comes to visit me in my little cloud. I don't know why. Maybe it's cause I'm cuttin' muffins." -- I Love Beans

"I got my mojo risin'. There's a poodle in my stroodle! Minkey Boodle! Minkey Boodle!" -- Minkey Boodle

"So tell me that I'm smelly. Tell my I'm a dope. But say you'll be my sweetie. At least give me hope. Cause I could use a cuddle, and a smooch or three. Everyone needs lovin'. Even me." -- Everyone Needs Lovin'

"You know, love is a happy time all throughout the universe. It's when a male part of the species goes to the female part of the species and says, 'Hey you want to go on a date?' and then she would say, 'Why yes, I'd like to go on a date' if you're lucky! And then you go to a restaurant, and she gets something called 'a salad,' and then he gets a big piece of beef that he eats. And that, to me, ladies and gentlemen, is love. Kind of makes you cry, doesn't it?" -- I Love Almost Everybody

"You pick your left foot up until you touch your nose. Put your rear on your ear and wiggle your toes. Hop all around like a kangaroo. Your almost ready to Hoodliehoo. Grab some pickles and a pound of cheese. Get some burgers on mayoneese. Eat 'em all up and don't forget to chew. Now you're doin' the Hoodliehoo!" -- Hoodliehoo

"I'm goin' down Highway 40 in my big ol' pickup truck!" -- Highway 40 Unplugged

Album Cover: 9 of 10. One point deduction for leaving Moltar off the cover (and the album). The idea that Space Ghost lives in the suburbs and hosts backyard bar-b-ques with Zorak and Brak is simply delightful. What's even more delightful is that the scene takes a horrific turn for the worse on the back cover when the grill explodes, blowing a hole through the backyard fence. And that, kids, is why grownups should never add lighter fluid once the briquettes have started glowing.

Comments: I cherish the memories of watching Cartoon Planet's "Space Ghost Coast to Coast" with my young son--who very much loved his dad during the 90s--in the basement of our little brick home on Tanager street in Pocatello. However, my memories of this album are mostly of listening to it with Erik during my grad school years while we were driving from Smithfield to Logan. I also listened to it by myself on headphones while working at Utah State writing HTML code in a teeny, tiny office. My latest memory of the album is of listening to it with my son while driving from Disney World to his home in Stuart and laughing our fool heads off. (He is now as old as I was when I started grad school.) For a father and son to have an album that they both love to listen to and laugh at for over 20+ years is no small thing.

Besides the lyrics listed above, my favorite parts of the album include several songs in which Space Ghost, Zorak, and Brak engage in some comedic scatting. I actually did some comedic scatting during my teenage years, so I really appreciate the artistry involved. See, the seniors on the football team demanded that I scat for them Louis Armstrong style while they sang "This Little Light of Mine" on the bus rides home from the games. They even made me scat to the song in front of the home crowd during a school-wide rally on the football field before the Homecoming game. Was it a dumb thing to do? Yes. Was I embarrassed to do it in front of all those alpha females in the cheerleading squad and the pep club? Yes. But when you're a scrawny kid trapped on a bus with muscle-bound seniors that are more than willing to pound you into a pile of silly putty during football practice, it's a good policy to humor them by doing whatever they ask you to do. For football practice during my junior year, scatting meant surviving. Of course, during my senior year when I had put on a little muscle and didn't have to worry about other guys trying to take my head off in practice with a flying tackle, I stopped scatting.

There are 25 excellent songs on this album, but between some of them are little spoken tidbits that are lots of fun to listen to as well. Zorak's Nugget of Joy and Brak's School Daze story (I told you never trust a monkey!) always tickle my funny bone (which is located somewhere in my torso area above my belly button but below my ribs). I like to follow along with these spoken interludes by doing the Zorak parts in my Zorak voice. For some reason, when Space Ghost first came out, I put in enough effort to figure out how to do a Zorak impersonation, but I could never master the voices of Brak or Space Ghost. Maybe I found Zorak easier to do because he's evil just like me. Or maybe it's because I've always had a high regard for the praying mantis because it eats all of the nasty bugs in the garden. In fact, along with the ladybug, it's one of the few insects I refuse to kill even if they make it inside the house. Also, Zorak plays the keyboard, so we have that in common as well. 

Why is this album so high on my list? Because not only does it activate happy memories of those days when I was kind of a cool dad, it still makes me laugh harder than any other album on my top 60 album list, including Weird Al's "Poodle Hat." So for all the joy that it has provided in the past and still provides today, this Musical Bar-B-Que makes it into my top 20 favorite albums.

Up Next: It's as big as a whale, and it's about to set sail!

20. True Romance by Charli XCX

 20. True Romance by Charli XCX

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGmM2l39LEs&list=PLrwB2tGkO7bKz-kWcRP7MSm2DYpoQfPUz

When I first heard Australian rapper Iggy Azalea's song "Fancy" on the radio in 2014, I didn't care much for Iggy's rapping. In fact, I found it more annoying that pretty much any rapping I had ever heard. But there was this ear-worm chorus sung by Charli XCX that got me to wondering what else this dark-haired girl had written. What Google told me was that while Charli had put out some music on MySpace and released a few mix tapes, she had only one bona fide album from 2013 called "True Romance." So I YouTubed the album and upon hearing the first song "Nuclear Seasons" I knew I'd found a type of music that was much different from anything that I was used to listening to. It sounded a bit like electronic dance music, but it had lyrics and layers to it that were much more interesting than the typical EDM club music I'd heard before (all of which I found to be really repetitive and boring). I wasn't sure what to call it. It wasn't quite pop music, and it wasn't quite dance music. It seemed to be more akin to art rock, but it really wasn't rock. It was its own thing.

I found out later that the term for this type of music is "Hyperpop," although it's also been called synth pop and gothic pop. However, Charli rejects all of those labels, even though she did refer to the music on her debut album as "Emotional Pop." At first, I wasn't sure if I liked it or not. But I found myself going back to the album repeatedly over the next year as one of my get-ready-in-the-morning albums. And the more I found out about Charli XCX -- her real name is Charlotte Emma Aitchison -- the more intrigued I became with her music. It turns out that she has synesthesia--a condition in which the brain interprets sound by seeing colors--and she actually sees colors in the music that she writes. She said that the songs on True Romance are mostly shades of purple. She prefers music that she sees as black, pink, purple or red, and she gave away what turned out to be the first hit song that she ever wrote--"I Love It" by the Swedish group Icona Pop--because she thought the song was the wrong color for her. Anyway, I bring this all up to show that there is a reason that the album cover is predominately black, pink, purple, and red. How you see the colors on the cover are similar to how she sees colors in music.

2014 and 2015 turned out to be a banner years for Charli, as she had her first big solo hit with the song "Boom, Clap" from the movie "The Fault in Our Stars." Her record company wanted to capitalize on her new popularity, so they got her to release a more mainstream pop album titled "Sucker." Along with "Boom, Clap," the album had hits with "Break the Rules," "Doing It," and "Famous." The rest of the album songs are really good pop, but they are a different kind of sound than what we got on True Romance. The record company continued to try to pressure Charli to do more mainstream songs, but after 2016, she said she wasn't going to release any more songs that she didn't love. She took back control of her own artistic future, and she faded from the pop music scene. Well, not really. She kept writing really good pop songs that other artists charted with, all the while experimenting with new sounds and collaborating with other artists. Her influence on other pop artists is pretty big, which is one reason why Taylor Swift asked Charli to go on tour with her in 2018. Of course, when the pandemic hit in 2020, a lot of artists stopped performing and took time off from making music. But Charli recorded and released the album "How I'm Feeling Now" while on Covid lockdown in her home. But of all the songs, mix tapes, and albums she's released over the last decade, I still like True Romance the best. 

Warning! Charli does use the F-word in some of her songs, so they aren't the kind you can listen to while around the kids. But I discovered True Romance around the time I started hating my job at Boise State, and the F-word was uttered by me more than once every morning while I was in the shower and started thinking about how I was about to face another work day in which every single meeting with my so-called superiors would be a humiliating kick in the crotch. Fortunately, a mix of Charli XCX and AC/DC (who never curse in their lyrics) somehow got me by until I managed to find a better job that didn't make me feel like dropping F-bombs in the shower in the morning. Also, Charli will use "shit" quite freely on some songs. It's definitely not the kind of album I could have listened to as a teenager in my basement bedroom. And my wife doesn't understand why I listen to this album either. When she hears me playing it, she'll say something like, "Why are you listening to that?!" Fortunately, I'm an old man now, and I get to listen to whatever I want. At least, I get to whenever Julie has already gone to work and I'm getting ready in the morning by myself--or with my poodles that like Charli XCX just fine! Yes, I realize that hyperpop written by a 20-year-old English woman is not really the kind of music that most people would think and old 50+ year old man like me would be listening to. But what can I say--maybe my ears aren't always as old as the rest of me.

Nardo

21. Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack by The Bee Gees

21. Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack by The Bee Gees  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_izvAbhExY&list=OLAK5uy_k2P31OPRADjYdtzYiDjFmk5Q5wxGIYm_U

If you hate disco, you hate this album. But if you fondly remember 1977 and 1978 like I do--which is that sixth grade year just before I turned 12--then this is album is not only the soundtrack to the movie, but it's also the soundtrack to pretty much your entire school year from September of 1977 through May of 1978. 

While there are a variety of artists on the album, most of them were previously released songs that got included in the movie. But it was the new songs by the Bee Gees that really made this album a true disco juggernaut. Two of the Bee Gees songs on the album had been previously released--"Jive Talkin'" and "You Should Be Dancin'." But they wrote five new songs for the album, all of which became major hits, including:

• Stayin' Alive
• How Deep Is Your Love (one of my Top 200 songs) 
• Night Fever
• More Than a Woman
• If I Can't Have You -- performed by Yvonne Eliman 

Fun Fact: John Travolta wasn't dancing to the Bee Gees during the filming of the movie. He was dancing to...you guessed it...Boz Scaggs. But the record company wouldn't license the Boz Scaggs music because they wanted to hold on to it for another disco movie. Bad move. So the Bee Gees were brought in AFTER the film was shot, and they made sure that the music beats of their songs matched that of the Boz Scaggs songs that were being danced to in the movie.

This soundtrack won the Gramm for Album of the Year, and it's the second-best selling movie soundtrack album of all time. (The Bodyguard soundtrack overtook it.) But as good as the album was, it could have been better. The Bee Gees wrote other songs for it that didn't get included, so they gave them to others to record. "Emotion" got recorded by Samantha Sang with Barry Gibb singing backup vocals. And little brother Andy Gibb recorded "(Our Love) Don't Throw It All Away." 

There are some other fun disco songs to listen to on this album, including "A 5th of Beethoven," "Disco Inferno," and "Boogie Shoes"--a B-side song for K.C. and the Sunshine Band that found new life when it got included on this album and got rereleased as a single. There are a handful of other instrumental disco songs that might work well as elevator music, but nothing so good that it deserves repeated listening. Nope. It's the Bee Gees songs that are the main attraction of this album, and it's because of the way that those songs trigger memories of that sixth grade year--playing fear-free at recess because all the bullies had moved on and we were at the top of the food chain, me and Sheldon getting in trouble for wearing bandanas and then stealing them back from the principal's office during the night of the school fair, riding the motorcycle on the farm for hours after school until it was time to watch "Wonder Woman" and "The Incredible Hulk." There just aren't too many albums that can conjure up the feelings and memories of that wonderful time for me anymore, but this one always delivers.

Nardo