Hot Girls At Work

This may be the oddest post I've even put up on this blog. In fact, I considered not even doing it at all since it is way off my regularly beaten path of punk, hardcore, metal and rock. In the end, this is my blog and I do it as a document to my own record collecting history, so fuck it, here it is.

The past couple of years I've been more and more nostalgic for that music from my youth. I spent a good deal of time last year listening to those bands that really introduced me to heavy metal around 1983 or so, and recently I've slipped back even further...to those early 80's MTV days. I was a kid of that time period, and at 11 and 12 years old, I lived and died by the radio and music videos. As a young kid, secluded in Maine, songs from Billy Idol and Joan Jett had some swagger and attitude, and I was drawn to that stuff...but all the music from that time period left such an imprint on my brain, and lately I find that I want to immerse myself in the music of those days. I found a playlist on Spotify called Early MTV (80's Hits), and I've been having a blast revisiting old songs that I would watch the video for over and over back in the day. Even the stuff that I didn't really care for back then has been so much fun to listen to again these days.

I was having such a great time listening to those old songs, and while I wasn't interested in checking out the full albums from those bands, the idea of picking up some of the singles did start to take root in my brain. Initially, I figured that I'd only pick them up if I saw them out in wild...but with all the record shops closed, and the itch growing more intense for some of these singles, I started to check to see what Discogs had available and toyed with the idea of only picking them up if I could find them cheap...and then the obsession kicked up a notch when I started to look into what the Japanese singles looked like...

Eleven year old Mike was a big fan of Loverboy. These guys were the coolest, and the video for Hot Girls In Love, complete with boys wearing bandana headbands and hot blondes driving fast cars...fuck yes, it was everything that this pre-teen boy needed. This was one of the gateway bands that set me down the path to search for heavier and heavier music. When I started wondering where I should start when collecting my "MTV singles", Loverboy was one of the bands that I had my sights on.

Another Loverboy single that I picked up was The Kid Is Hot Tonight. This was another killer song that was just massive for me at the time. No one was cooler than Mike Reno. You better fucking believe it.

This single didn't get a Japanese pressing, so I was content with the regular US picture sleeve pressing.

Men At Work were another favorite for me in the early 80's, before I discovered hard rock and metal. By the time their second album, Cargo, came out in '83, I was starting to move on from that kind of pop, so when the song Overkill popped up on the MTV spotify playlist, I wasn't initially familiar with it. Once the song started to kick in, I started to vaguely remember it, and by the time the song was finished I was fucking loving it. Wow. I was not expecting to enjoy that as much as I did. Goddamn. I kept returning to the song, and loved it with each spin. Time to buy the record.

I was feeling pretty good about my initial haul of MTV singles, but man, that Overkill song really had me hooked, and since I remember how much I loved the early Men At Work songs in '81, I decided to grab Who Can It Be Now to finish off this run. I must have watched that video 100 times when we got MTV, and Colin Hay's lazy eye freaked me out every damn time. Classic!

Picking up these four singles was fun, and I don't know how much time and money I want to end up sinking into this dumb project...but still, I want more.