Oh- ee-oh, oh, ee-oh...

[dragonlady7]

I woke up this morning and promptly got a song stuck in my head.

This was no mere mortal song.

This was one of those songs so bad it has no right to exist. And, to make matters worse, it's one of those songs that is now so obscure that the vast, vast majority of human beings, even if your sample is baised toward awareness of old pop songs, do not know that it ever existed.
It is also one of those songs that it's embarrassing to admit that you even know.

What, you might ask, was the song? I'm sure you're drooling with anticipation to hear me embarrass myself, especially given that I'm one of those people who rarely listens to pop music and whose knowledge of pop music of decades past is especially shaky. How bad must it be, you wonder, that I know it and nobody else does?

Well...

When I was a preteen, my family owned a grand total of about a dozen records and maybe two dozen cassette tapes. (This was, you may recall, in the Bronze Age, also known to those of you wiseasses older than me as The Late Eighties.)
The vast majority of these records and tapes were either traditional Irish music, or had titles like Songs And Music Of The American Revolution. Because, you see, my parents are even bigger dorks than I am. (I actually still think that American Revolution record is pretty phatty, and have been known to sing How Stands The Glass Around when in my cups. Or, while doing the dishes.)

However. Well-meaning people had, at various points, gifted my sisters and I with a curious selection of cassetes containing what we were informed was "pop" music. Given that our mother had abandoned her habit of gathering us around the piano to sing folk songs at night when she went back to work after Ann was in school (I'm not kidding about that either. I have been known to sing Clementine whilst in nostalgic moods.), we had little to occupy our ears, and so these so-called "pop" tapes were often thrown onto the hi-fi to aid us in entertaining ourselves. Curious, and bored, and intrigued by this "popular culture" of which our friends spoke, we studied the glossy liner notes and read the lyrics, and attempted to understand what these tapes contained.

All of which is, of course, simply to explain why I could not get New Kids On The Block's Cover Girl out of my head for nearly an hour this morning. "Oh, ee-oh, she's mah Cover Girl, irl irl ir, Oh, ee-oh, oh, ee-oh."
Lord, what an awful song. Yes, as you can guess, one of the several tapes we had (I think Katy owned this one, but I could be wrong) was New Kids On The Block's album Hangin' Tough (I think that was the name. The song Hangin' Tough [which, of course, I also know well enough to be horrified by-- can I have that brainspace back please??] was certainly the most embarrassing song on the tape, and I was reluctant to play it when either of my parents was in the room, because ostensibly my generation had produced this crap and I was leery of being identified with it). Other fine selections included Debbie Gibson's "Electric Youth" and Tiffany's... whatever it was called. (It had the remake of that old song on it. That was really popular. I don't remember what it was called. But I remember that her voice was really nasal.)

Anyhow, that freaking song was in my head until I remembered that I own an iPod. Within two minutes, I had cued up something else, and was restored to myself again, and did my grocery shopping in suitably-musicked style.
My selection, for the curious, was a song I thought far more honest, and yet remaining close to the topic of the first song:
Motorhead's Jailbait.