In which I listen to music from 1983 (part 1)

 I usually end up talking about Music Advent for Holidailies because otherwise I get overwhelmed with all the daily things that I'm doing in December. Music Advent is just a thing that somebody who I was friends of friends with on Twitter started several years ago - it's a tag, basically. You post music videos, and it has had various schemes for what you're supposed to do when, but this year for the first time, you're supposed to pick a year and stick with it. So I did 1983 because that's when I was in my early 20s and totally into New Wave music and I knew that would be relatively easy. I'm thinking of it as "what I was listening to" rather than sticking strictly with things that were released in 1983, although most of what I've posted fits both. I know the Echo & the Bunnymen song was actually released in 1982 but it was a single in 1983, I believe. So yeah, not nitpicking too much about this.

The thing that made this easy for me is, I had a mix-tape back in the day that I know most of the contents of. I spent, as I recall, most of a day making this mix-tape off of my friend Rick's albums and imported singles. I think that this mix-tape is actually in my apartment somewhere but I don't have a cassette player any more anyway, and I would just be going off of the song listing. But I remember what a lot of it was even if I don't succeed in physically locating it! (Yeah, I am a hoarder, I admit it. Rob helps me keep the worst of it in check, thank goodness.)

(I don't seem to know how to embed to get a video to show up directly here, so I'm just doing links to YouTube.)

1. Big Country, In a Big Country
This song was a pretty big hit at the time, as I recall, and it was the first thing on my mix tape, which is why I started with it.. I'm also pretty sure I knew some other Big Country songs at the time, or at least whatever was on the B-side of this single, but I don't remember anything else offhand. I haven't tried to look.

2. The Alarm, The Stand

Stephen King's book The Stand apparently came out in 1978, so it was old hat by then, and it was long before the (pretty crappy) miniseries that came out later on. But this is the only song I know of that references it. (I'm sure there's more by now, somewhere out there.) Anyway, it's still a pretty good song.

3. Cyndi Lauper, Girls Just Want to Have Fun
Everybody knows this one, right? It's the biggest hit out of the ones I've done so far. Like these others was on my original fall-of-1983 mix-tape, The song holds up very well. The middle part of the video is pretty boring but the first and last sections are still kinda awesome.

That's all I have time to talk about right now, but I'm sure I'll come back with more of these later. (All 25 things are not going to be things that were on my original mix-tape. I'm not at all sure that there were 25 songs on it. But they are all things I knew back in the day, for sure.)