I’ve had 25 years to think about it and I still don’t understand Solid Gold.
I was very young when it aired so I’m certain I’m misremembering, because it couldn’t have been what I think it was: a television show counting down the top 10 songs of the week, but just to keep things spicy and tele-visual… interpretive dancers? No, that can’t be right. It can’t be.
I think the main problem with it is association. It used to come on Saturday mornings either right before or just after the cartoons, so I was either impatient for it to get over with so I could watch me some Smurfs or I was pissed off at it because it meant my primary-colored world of weekend escape was lost again to live-action Adult World with its muted palettes of mauves and taupes. That might be a slight exaggeration as it was the ‘80s and the mauve was usually in the hair, but I think you get the general point. I cherished my brief open window into pen-and-ink moral simplicity for those few hours of a Saturday. It was only respite in a popular entertainment landscape zooming way over my young, uninitiated head with the needless ambiguity and tortured complexity of grown-up TV like The A-Team and Airwolf. Solid Gold slammed that window down on my chubby young fingers, mocking me while it did it by making me ask my mom who the fuck Dionne Warwick was. I never did get a straight answer out of her.
As I said, the problem is one of negative association. I’m emotionally aware enough to recognize my recollection is tainted by disappointment. There’s no way television executives sat in a room and decided to fund, produce, hire a union crew, rehearse, film and broadcast people in leotards, precision-torn off-the-shoulder T-shirts and a Hindenburg of AquaNet dancing to anything by the Cars.
Don’t get me wrong, I like the Cars. But between my relative youth and all the rails of blow, some of the ‘80s are a little blurry for me. Did we not have radios? Could we not have heard those songs elsewhere? I don’t think anyone was clamoring to see Ric Ocasek lip sync “You Might Think.” Nobody was clamoring to see Ric Ocasek at all. And certainly not fronting a troupe of pseudo-Indians in DayGlo facepaint doing unspeakable things to the watusi in horrible, choreographed unison.
Maybe it’s unhealthy, but I choose denial. There’s no way that happened.
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6 comments:
Once I stopped trying to figure out what Solid Gold was a metaphor of, I realized this post confuses me, because I thought you were roughly my same age (maybe a year or two older), yet I have NO memories, at all, of Solid Gold from my childhood. Not a single one.
Actually, now I think about it, perhaps this absence in my memory is just the proof you need that such a thing never happened. Or that I DID in fact somehow manage to see it, and was so profoundly traumatized that my unconscious mind completely repressed the experience.
Two unrelated items:
Good use of the awful word "taupe."
Ric Ocasek married a supermodel.
I kept trying to figure out what Solid Gold was a metaphor for as well. Usually I just start typing and the metaphor-y part just happens, but nope, not this time. This time it was just straightforward, regular confusion. And now that I don't have you as a secondary witness, maybe it's less a metaphor than an exercise in existential thought. Or physics. Or, frankly, taste and good parenting?
I thought the dancers were the sole point of Solid Gold. Everything else was just an excuse for bringing a handful of hot scantily clad women on stage to romp around for a few minutes at a time. It was better than MTV in that regard, because with MTV you would watch bad video after bad video in the hope that eventually one with hot chicks would show up. On Solid Gold that was assured. I actually didn't remember that Solid Gold featured real stars singing their own hits.
mrgumby: so are the dancers the metaphor? if so, what of? i guess for awhile on MTV the closest thing to actual hot chicks were the scary women in robert palmer videos, and the fabulously fancy hair metal bands.
and what WERE those girls about, in the robert palmer videos? they always creeped out my youthful self.
Those Robert Palmer chicks still creep me out; those little looks they keep giving each other? I feel they're judging and dismissing me for finding them hot.
It's too disturbing.
Gumb-o: You don't remember the singing because I don't think there was much actual "singing" per se. But yes, I see your point, when you think "Solid Gold" you immediately think "Solid Gold Dancers." And when I say "you" I mean not me. I mostly think of Andy Gibb. Dreamy.
KnK: I think the girls in those videos were a subtextual satirical jab at misogyny. You know, they all look the same, interchangeable, reduced to their physical exteriors. But then if you look at the whole picture, if they wanted to, they could have banded together and crushed Robert Palmer to dust. It's a commentary on the illusion of patriarchal power systems. Or a bunch of wiggly hips and boobs.
Gumb-o x2: Feeling threatened, I see. Their ploy worked perfectly, Mr. Man.
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