Victim of Variety

People who've grown up entirely in what Casey Kasem used to call "the rock era," dating from when "Rock Around the Clock" hit #1 in 1955, have a lot of music backed up in their minds. Even if we listened to only one particular genre we live in a world with rock and pop music playing as a soundtrack at every clothing and grocery store and inside every mall. It was a major part of almost every movie and television show.

Which just means that when one of those songs from somewhere during our lives turns into an earworm, there's no telling where it might come from. Recently, I've had on heavy rotation three songs that have nothing to do with each other -- two have explanations but one I can't figure.

The version of Oingo Boingo's "Dead Man's Party" from an April 1987 concert gets a lot of play around Halloween and it's pretty irresistibly catchy. So when it made an appearance a couple of weeks ago in its usual holiday mode I found myself "pressing play" on the YouTube clip three or four times a day.

Jon Landau once tabbed a hard-working New Jersey rocker as the "future of rock and roll" and it wasn't John Lyon. Although as "Southside Johnny" and backed by the Asbury Jukes he toiled in the same clubs and venues as Bruce Springsteen and his E-Streeters, lightning never struck for him. But in the early 80s video era, programmers hungry for the next Bruce rolled the dice on Southside, promoting his single "New Romeo" and giving it a funny video with the singer as a sad sack running into a now-famous former girlfriend and her entourage. The band ditched "Asbury" from its name for this album, "In the Heat," and allowed some more modern sensibilities to undergird its solid soul sound, which makes the single more listenable than some of the cookie-cutter material from earlier efforts. It never made the charts, but it's been stuck in my head ever since I found an old mixtape that had the single on it and checked it out on Ye Olde Tube as well.

But prefab 80s rockers Night Ranger and their 1984 single "When You Close Your Eyes?" I got nothing, except maybe it was all over the radio that year and so it's planted firm in some neuron or another that was unfortunately missed in the Great Friar Brain Cell Die-Off of 1986-1992. I'm pretty sure 20-year-old me is disgusted at the results.

The problem, of course, is that the YouTube algorithm keys up Survivor's "Can't Hold Back" right after Night Ranger and now I've got another one stuck in there.