I can still remember that moment when a little bit of my youthful optimism died. It was Hall & Oats who did it. In particular it was their song, Private Eyes.
Then I was 10 years old and now I'm casually sauntering towards 40, but a remake of their song by The Bird and the Bee brought the memory suddenly to mind, as fresh as if it were days and not decades ago. My family had moved to a farm a few years back, one that sat near the end of a mile-long dead end road. I got to be friends with two other boys who lived at the very end of the road and their family was a bit more hip than mine. Their mom got them an awesome hits album that had been advertised on TV!
I still remember seeing those ads and thinking all the songs sounded so amazing. Even cooler were the visuals. Private Eyes was released in the same year that MTV went on the air. Previously, music videos were really only seen in TV ads for hit compilation albums like this one, as far as I'm aware. What seems boring, normal and more than a little cheesy now was mind-blowing back then.
What I didn't really realize at the time was that in the ads you only hear the chorus. I had this idea that the whole song was going to be that cool. [spoiler]It isn't.[/spoiler] The verses sound quite a bit different and have less energy. That seems obvious and not particularly interesting now, but at the age of 10, it was a huge disappointment. (Most people would probably have had this epiphany earlier, but I'm slow.) Life is full of those moments, like when you get to Disneyland™ and find out that 90% of your time is spent in lineups, or when you get to the centre of the jawbreaker and realize that you now feel like crap.
Now that I'm (much) older and (not much) wiser, I not only understand that advertising leaves out the bad stuff, I also realize that I don't want the whole song to be like the chorus. (I also don't want to suck on a jawbreaker or go to the Happiest Lineup on Earth™.) I like the variation. I like the verses.
Kids are dumb.
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