Song Of The Day 6/13/2015: Sneakers – “(Love's Like a) Cuban Crisis”

Well, there goes another source of paranoid fun now that we've normalized relations with Cuba. I got a bunch of songs that no longer have context. Like this one, or XTC's "Living Through Another Cuba." Or "Do You Hear What I Hear?" (No, really, look it up.) The fear part was over for a long time, but now we can't even fashion a healthy disdain for our neighbors to the south of Florida. I wonder when the Club Med gets built. 'Cause once the Club Med gets built, prop me up, vaccinate me and point me to the inner tube rental, I'm there. I am so there. Me and the Golden Girls. That'll be some messed-up canasta action down Ché-Way.

Sneakers were from North Carolina. This was during the time of the power pop spurt when use of an article before a plural noun was sort of left to the discretion of the linguist. I can't tell if we're supposed to say Sneakers or The Sneakers. Now, there was another power pop band -- interestingly enough, called Shoes -- where the article was definitely out. They were Shoes. Not the Shoes. Nope. A whole, undefined pool of unspecified, unnumbered Shoes. It could be three Shoes. It could be three thousand Shoes. It could be the shoes you were thinking of, or perhaps another set of Shoes you didn't know the first thing about. Or some things you didn't even realize were supposed to be Shoes. We're not here to dictate to you about how many Shoes you want. But we're also not going to limit ourselves to your ideas of the definition or limitations of our Shoes.

Same thing with Sneakers. I think. I believe it's a Sneakers in general. Not the Sneakers. Broaden your horizons next time you're at Foot Locker.

Chris Stamey and Will Rigby were in Sneakers. They went on to form the very pictograph of an '80s cult favorite band, the dB's. Stamey also went off on his own and did other errands. Don Dixon produced this effort. He later produced a lot of Smithereens albums. Mitch Easter helped somewhere in an undefined way. Later on, both Easter and Dixon would produce the first two R.E.M. albums Murmur and Reckoning, which knocked budding communications majors over with a feather at the time. I wasn't in the area. I was dreaming about Cuba somewhere.