Song Of The Day 5/25/2015: 20/20 – “Song of the Universe”

Overpop – The '80s: This week’s a sequel to Overpop – The ’70s which ran back in March. It’s a quick study of pop songs that contained everything they needed to be popular except for popularity. And a tribute to the grizzled, harried, nervous and a little put-out people who continue to champion what should have been in direct about-face to what actually was.

You know, people like me, the forsaken power-pop pushers. The sloppy dressers who snap to attention whenever a Rickenbacker is played within a 25-mile radius. We’re amongst you. We feed off two-mixer cocktails, huffed objects and spite. We occasionally go on about how Tommy was too distracted to pull of what The Who Sell Out had already nailed. We know what British terms like “lorry” mean. We don’t like pageboy haircuts so much as we understand them. Whenever we’re in an auto part store and we see one of those Chilton auto manuals “September Gurls” goes off in our heads. (Wait – we don’t go into auto parts stores.) We have a scale by which we judge things based on the tenures of Squeeze’s piano players – “That gig was great, an absolute Jools Holland.” “That show was lacking, nothing more than a Matt Irving disguised as a Paul Carrack.” We don’t like Eric Carmen’s “All By Myself” so much as we understand it, but we’ll defend “She Did It” until you get around to asking us to actually play the thing.

So here’s another week of favorites of this insufferable street gang I hang out with. Here’s 20/20. Pull up a chaise lounge.