We've got an 80's station. And not just any 80's station, either, but "the Triangle's new Star 102.9 and 96.9.²" That's right, at any hour of the day or night, one can flick on the radio and be serenaded with the dulcet tones of the Go-Gos, Naked Eyes or, if you're really lucky, Animotion.

Now, before we go any further, let's get one thing straight: 80's format is oldies for those of us who'd have a collective coronary thrombosis if we heard the music of our hormonally overcharged youth referred to as such.

We can try to deny it, but the evidence, however, is irrefutable. It's 2001. "Tainted Love," possibly the only #2 hit that could be performed adequately on an ATM, is over two decades old. C.C. Deville, legendary makeup-wearing guitarist for immortal hair-rockers Poison, now looks like he belongs in a rocking chair, yelling at those damn kids from Korn to get off his lawn. And anthemic Irish rockers U2 have had enough time to come full circle and release an album that sounds like their output from the Unforgettable Fire period³ without the slightest hint of irony.

After all, as much as modern music critics feel compelled excoriate the decade, the sad truth is that the 80's actually had a fair bit to offer musically. The first flowering of rap (and its initial union with hard rock in the form of "Walk This Way"), New Jack, the first stirrings of alternative (before everyone decided that having a lousy haircut and ripping off Damn the Torpedoes was what alternative was supposed to be), and most of all, intricate power pop -- all of this was a product of the much-maligned decade. Compare your average Go-Go's song with your average piece of Max Martin-scribed boy-band pap. You'll notice key changes. Fills. Grace notes. Multiple verses between choruses - all things that modern pop music has tossed aside in a rush to get to more closeups of Britney's silicone-enhanced navel.

And most of all, even when it was Godawful crap -- which a lot of it was, neat countrapuntal themes and all -- it was fun⁶.

And fun, not deep existential themes or the sound of a 19-year-old trying desperately to sneak a half-millimeter more cleavage into her video, is what I want when I listen to the radio in the car. I look forward to the opportunity to sing (badly) along with "Pour Some Sugar On Me" while the drivers in other cars look at me like I'm totally deranged⁷.

So it was with high hopes that I first tuned into the station, an act which my manager had described as "being like crawling into a cocoon." Unfortunately, the first rule of a cocoon is that it's for small, crawling intertebrates. The second is that after a short period, it no longer fits its inhabitant. And the third is that cocoons are generally stuck on the undersides of leaves or against garage walls, and as such, being inside one while driving is probably not the best idea. After all, there are only so many times one can hear an ad asking "When was the last time you heard this?" followed by a few bars of "Come On, Eileen," before you start screaming "Fifteen goddamned minutes ago, the last time you played the ad!"

More importantly, however, was the unexpected revelation that an 80's station doesn't bring back just some memories of the time. It brings back all of them, good and bad. It means hearing "Promises, Promises" and flashing back to hearing that by the pool the summer before sophomore year of high school, with all of the insecurities that went with it. It also means remembering the rest of what was played that summer along with Naked Eyes, and that leads to some disturbing questions.

Star 102.9 isn't really an 80's station, you see. It's a "What we would have liked the 80's to be" station. It plays Madonna. It plays the Go-Gos. It plays enough Phil Collins to make you wish that Peter Gabriel had decided that standing up in front of Genesis while dressed like a geranium was a good idea. And by the monstrous ghost of David Coverdale's hairstyle, they play Journey.

Now, despite the fact that MTV included the video for "Separate Ways" in its "25 Worst of All Time" list⁸, Journey was not an awful band. They were, like many of their brethren, mediocre, with occasional flashes in one direction or the other. They sold a lot of records, they played a lot of stadiums, and they inspired both an arcade and a home video game⁹. But let's be honest here: Even if "Send Her My Love" got you your first tentative grope, even if you put "Faithfully" on the mix tape labeled "In Case I Get Lucky," you have to admit that Journey was not the quintessential 80's band. After Frontiers, they barely made a blip¹⁰, and we're talking most of the decade by that standard. But they're what the local program director would like to posit the 80's as.

Not Bell Biv Devoe, though New Jack had a good long chart run.

Not Run-DMC, though they singlehandedly broke rap into the charts.

Not Icicle Works, or any New Romantic band that didn't appear on the soundtrack to a John Hughes movie.

Not even Godawful stuff like Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam, or Rebbie Jackson, or sweet Lord help us all, Jermaine "We Don't Have To Take Our Clothes Off" Stewart.

No. We get Journey. We get Foreigner. We get a very limited selection of African-American artists - Prince and Terence Trent D'Arby and not much more. We get the same bloody ZZ Top and Steve Winwood song over and over - often in the same order. And we get force-fed what we're supposed to remember 80's music being.

This, perhaps, is the most disappointing thing about the station: the sheer paucity of tracks on their playlist.

Let's do a little math. There were 10 years in the 80's, with 52 weeks a year, and 10 top ten songs in any given week. Now, making the conservative assumption that there was a turnover of only 2 songs per week in that top ten, we still come up with the following:  

10x52x2=1040 distinct songs that would be in rotation. At an average length of 4 minutes per song, that's almost 70 hours, not including commercials, before they have to repeat. Seventy hours, and that's if they stuck exclusively to things that cracked the top 10.

But we don't even get all of the top 10. We get "Back in the High Life" over and over again, because it fits neatly into the pre-fab slot of what 80's is supposed to be. And while there's nothing wrong with "Back in the High Life," there's even less wrong with giving it a rest once in a while and replacing it with "The Old Man Down the Road" or "My Radio" or "Round and Round." If you're going to play Mr. Mister, they might as well play the band Mr. Mister was so desperately aping, and play all of those Velveeta-laden Chicago ballads that Peter Cetera somehow managed to sing without moving his lower jaw.

And most of all, if you're going to give us the 80's, give us the 80's. Let us decide which parts of it we want to hear. And if you're missing the CDs or the records that allow you to give us that, you're welcome to borrow mine.

After I finish listening to Kilroy Was Here, of course¹². On vinyl.

12. Paradise Theater being the much superior album in most critics' opinions, but lacking the certain special something that came along with "Heavy Metal Poisoning."