WHERE OLDSKOOL LIVES

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Yeah We Listened to it

In the 80s (especially the early 80s) some of best music was made but Caucasians. Keep It Oldskool founder Chuck Da Oldhead likes to call these songs “Caucasian Classics” These are songs that even the hardest most gangsta dudes in the 80s knew the words to. It’s different the way radio is now set up and you don’t get the interplay of different formats like you had in the 80s. In Philadelphia there was a station called 98 Hot Hits where you could hear songs like Apache by the SugarHill Gang and the next song would be True by Spandau Ballet.

It was also the time that the only videos that you could see that had African Americans was either Prince, Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie. Everyone “wanted their MTV” including us African Americans. We watched even though MTV wasn’t really feeling the brothers. A lot of the artists whether they were Rock or Pop crossed over into the inner cities. So even the dudes standing on the corner looking all hard knew the words to Angel is a Centerfold by J Giles Band or Rio by Duran Duran. No culture adapts more than the African American culture. So as the more established R&B stations did not play rap we listened to the stations that did . So if we wanted to hear The Message by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five we would also have to listen to Safety Dance by Men Without Hats. At some point later in the decade Hip Hop formatted stations began to develop and slowly but surely we began to drift away from stations like Hot Hits 98. But for us Oldheads when we hear a song like In the Air Tonight by Phil Collins it takes us back to a time when we would listen to those songs and have no problem singing along. That’s why we call them Caucasian Classics.