Anything Goes - Guns N Roses - Appetite for Destruction - 1987

I remember the tempest in a tea cup that followed GnR's initial success was largely focused on this song (before One In A Million two years later would overshadow it). In hindsite, the line "your panties round your knees and your ass in debris" does seem slightly misogynistic...but the barrage of raunch that we've seen in the...gulp...21 years since this album, has almost made that line seem quant and romantic.

Either way, this was never my favorite song off AFD...kinda monotonous and not that interesting. I'll take Rocket Queen any day of the week.

Animal - Def Leppard - Hysteria - 1987

I cannot even begin to tell you how much my entire 7th grade class loved this album. Little did we know that every single song on this album would one day be a stripper anthem.

All Across The Sand - The Stone Roses - Sally Cinnamon EP - 1987

The Stone Roses always make me think of Driver's Ed...which is mostly a good thing.

I always found them just a little too anemic, too pasty and British...but I have to acknowledge their influence and that they could write a song when they chose too. Plus, I really wanted the girl who always played The Stone Roses in my driver's ed car. Any girl cool enough to be listening to The Stone Roses in Kokomo deserved my attention, sadly she didn't really see it the other way around.

Alex Chilton - The Replacements - Pleased to Meet Me - 1987

What's almost better than a first rate Big Star song? A fantastic Replacement song about Big Star, that's my answer...also, I love that Westerburg's vision of Chilton is slightly unhinged (Appropriately, on both men's accounts): Chilton is from Mars, children follow him like the pied pipper, he rapes and pillages through villages...only slightly less absurd is the idea, that actually existed for a few days, that Chilton had been lost in Hurricane Katrina...turned out not to be true, but it would have been an appropriately Westerburgian end to a man who was a legend to a depressingly small following.

One final note on the song itself, you can't go wrong with handclaps in a song. Much like cowbells, synchronized stops, and "na-na-na" choruses, it just always works.

Incidentally, this is song #100 in this little project. I'm 1% finished...swell...

Ages of You - R.E.M. - Dead Letter Office - 1987

A friend of mine recently played the new R.E.M. album for me. I haven't decided if I'll be adding it to the Pod yet or not, but what struck me most about it was how much they wished they were still this band...but this track, which had been floating around since their bar band days, and never made it on a proper studio album still has more energy and spirit than anything on that new album.

I have a complicated relationship with the boys from Athens...but there will be plenty of time to go into that later. For the moment, I'll enjoy them at their youthful best.