Whither 1985?

(image from here)

This is something I do every year: during my birthday week, I play songs from a year in the past.  & not just any year!  I started in 2003 (the first time my birthday rolled around during the show) with 1968, the year of my birth, & have gone up a year every year since then.  I have made it to 1985.  Which was (in my opinion) an amazing year for music.

Using the Rate Your Music website, I have gone through thousands of albums, singles, & EPs released that year.  I made long lists & spent the last week re-listening to many of those records to re-familiarize myself with them, to see if I still loved them as much as I once did (almost always the answer was hell yes), to decide what I might play on the show.  & a couple of things became obvious: one, there are too many songs to fit even a three-hour show; & two, I listened to a lot of musicians who were white & male.  Of course I did!  I was a lonely young white kid in a miserable suburb of Dallas in 1985.  I was naturally going to be drawn to songs designed for lonely white kids.

My half-assed solution is that I plan to revisit 1985 in six months.  The next show might not be my absolute top favorites, but certainly I think I can include great music I've discovered since my youth that is not quite as white & male as the stuff you'll hear tonight.

Tonight!  At midnight!  On 90.7 KBOO!  Online at kboo.fm!  Listen to the soundtrack of Gary's seventeenth year on the planet.  Sort of.  A lot of the music I would discover later.  But some of it I was actually listening to in 1985.  & like I said: I think it was a great year for music.