Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Harshin' the 70s Mellow

Upon further review, Shamus grudgingly admits that the 70s weren't completely bad. But he does revise and extend his original remarks that while the 1970s may not have been a complete waste of ten years, that decade produced bad stuff that is far more bad than any of the bad stuff produced in any other decade:

But I think we can all agree that when things were bad in the 70’s, they were really, really bad. Soul-crushing, mind-destroying, nightmarishly horrible.

As evidence for this proposition, he provides this music video of a disco song called "Apache". And yes: to describe its badness accurately would leave Roget's bereft of any more synonyms for "bad".

But, I can't help but wonder to what extent our perception of this video's mastodonic badness is a factor of time. I mean, this thing is twenty years older than, say, "MMM-Bop", and it's pretty much historical fact that what's seen as good and bad changes over time. So, I'm just going to throw this out to the readership: what relic from the 80s or 90s would you think as likely to look that bad when we're as distant from it as we are now from that video for "Apache"? If you're blogging in 2026 about how crappy the 1990s were, what will you cite as your evidence?

I'll start with "Achy Breaky Heart".


Jayme Lynn Blaschke said...

Um... no. "Apache" is awful in pretty much every way, no matter what era it's viewed in. The women are kinda cute, but geeze, could they be any more offensive with their cliche-ridden Apache dance?

I cannot believe this is a song from the Ventures of all groups!

Aaron said...

Actually this version comes to us from The Tommy Seebach Band.

For the 80's I'll throw this one out there. Granted, it is only five years later, but it is from the 80's.