Posted 2/21/2011 05:03:00 PM by Douglas

Every find yourself walking around thinking about John Mellencamp's 1982 rock anthem, "Hurt So Good?" Sure you do, so here's a taste:



But what really got my mind on "Hurt So Good" today, other than the fat, rockin' intro guitar riff, was an record I had when I was kid. I was somewhere less than 10 years old and I got my hands of a copy of K-tell's "Blast Off." What a beautiful piece of vinyl. These kids today have no idea what K-tell was. Hell, they have no idea what vinyl was. Luckily, there's this guy to straighten us out and take up back to day when we listened to our music six songs at a time. Then flipped it over for the other six:

Imagine yourself an 11-year old boy in 1982. You’re starting to get a little – if not much – taller. Starting to notice girls a bit. Starting to realize that the world at large isn’t just meant for grown-ups, but for you, too. Like movies. And music. And then, one afternoon while you’re watching TV (and remind me to tell you about life before cable or satellite TV, kids… that’s another story altogether) you see a commercial. I wish YouTube had the damned thing, because I’d show it to you now. From another commercial with two mom-age women conversing happily about kitchen floor cleaners, there’s suddenly this explosion of THE ROCK MUSIC. Guitars, synths, drums… it’s loud and it’s fast and it’s catchy as hell and it’s… it’s speaking to you, oh 11-year old boy. “K-Tel presents: Blast Off!” you hear, and then as the commercial rapidly flips from one song snippet to the next (and really, you only recognize one or two of the songs but it doesn’t matter because it’s THE ROCK MUSIC AND YOU MUST HAVE IT) they show band head shots and then the album cover and…

That's pretty much it. But let's finish off with Johnny Cougar:

The final song on the album: John Cougar. Now, kids… keep in mind this is John Cougar in his pre-Mellancamp days, before he realized that he could extrapolate the Dylan/Springsteen 101 of “Jack & Diane” into songs of legitimate complexity and artistry. John Cougar long before he began marrying supermodels and moving them to the middle of nowhere, Indiana, and then ditching them for… uh… Meg Ryan. (Yeah, kids, I don’t think that one’s ever gonna make sense.) This is all way before then. This is 1982, and when 1982 you hears the strains of “Hurts So Good” echoing across the tiny confines of your little bedroom, pushing at the limits of the tiny little speakers attached to the tiny little record player your parents bought you at Zayre’s and your foot starts stomping in time with the rhythm and you feel the bass rumble down in your… uh… abdomen… and you can only imagine what love feels like, how it can feel so great and act so destructively and somehow, in the process, hurt so good…

Man. That was when discovering music meant discovering life.

Do people get this excited about Justin Beiber or whatever crap Gaga Lady is droning on about? Maybe they do. I just can't imagine.