These are the same people who grew up to rant about millennials…
Welcome to another wild Wednesday where The Nest is about ready to put another of your favorite songs through its possum blood stained wringer of torture! It’s time for the next entry in my ever unpopular Top 30 Iconic Songs I Can’t Stand countdown! Let’s see what song DJ Scratchy and the Sponkies will be giving two thumbs down to and sending to detention this week…
#24. “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” – Simple Minds
It was apparently a law in the 1980’s that if you released a major motion picture, it had to include at least one original song on its soundtrack that would go on to become a huge radio hit. So much of the music that has come to define that decade was first heard in Dolby Digital Surround Sound at a theater near you. No other era in pop music history can even come close to matching the 80’s plethora of super movie hits, even if we did kinda forget about some of them…
Somewhere out there somebody has to remember my song!
But one thing we sure didn’t forget about were those two awful songs that rode the two biggest Brat Pack movies of the mid 80’s to the top of the charts… the theme from The Breakfast Club which is fittingly titled “Don’t You (Forget About Me)”…
Again, like last week’s entry, this isn’t really a terrible song. It just doesn’t stand up to the incessant overplay it has received for the last thirty years. What gives this song extra annoyance points with me, however, is that it completely obscures the great work Simple Minds did outside of a shitty John Hughes film…
The only Breakfast Club that The Nest cares about.
Simple Minds didn’t even want to record this damned song… and they were far from alone. The Fixx, Bryan Ferry and Billy Idol (Can you just imagine that?) all rejected this piece of shit as well… and it took a LOT of convincing to get Jim Kerr and the gang to sign off on doing it. And even after its amazing worldwide success that made them quite rich and famous, it was another decade before the group even accepted “Don’t You” as a part of their legacy by including it on one of their own albums and performing it live. I don’t blame them, because Simple Minds did a lot, LOT better music than this tired old coming of age canard. “Sanctify Yourself” is an awesome 80’s song you never hear anymore, and “All the Things She Said” is maybe the most inexplicably underrated music video of all time…
Who wants to perform someone else’s shit when you can be a true independent artiste like these guys?
I alluded to that second well known Brat Pack film earlier, and I can’t end my diatribe about lousy 80’s soundtrack music without also giving it a kick in the nads. John Parr’s “St. Elmo’s Fire (Man in Motion)” just barely beat out the song nobody is allowed to forget about for the honor of NOT appearing in my countdown… but the songs share something in common other than a group of forgettable actors. John Parr fucking kicked ass with his song “Naughty Naughty,” yet gets labeled as a one hit wonder in the 21st century just because rtro radio stations apparently threw out everything but their 80’s soundtrack albums!?!? Life is just so unfair…
The only St. Elmo’s fire The Nest cares about.
Come back next Wednesday to watch me wipe my ass with another classic song….
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