Rock She Said:
Guitars & Attitudes
On The Pop Side
Hip-O
Well, the Eighties are back with a vengeance. I’m not sure I’m ready for a nostalgia craze of when I was in high school and college, yikes! Proof of the return of the Eighties can be found in these two discs from Hip-O Records, featuring girl groups from the greed decade. First problem is that these collections are culled from Universal product only, so you get a collection of 80’s girl groups without the Go-Go’s or Fuzzbox, but with Klymaxx and Katrina and the Waves. About a fourth of these songs are absolute treasures. Songs from Blondie, Romeo Void, and Cyndi Lauper’s first band, Blue Angel, are terrific. About half are either harmless novelties and bits of nostalgia, like Missing Persons, Bow Wow Wow, and Bananarama, but the remainder are dreck that we should only be reminded of to keep it from happening again. Listening to Tiffany and the Pointer Sisters again makes the Spice Girls sound good. All of the songs are presented in good sound and all share an almost hypnotic set of hooks that you cannot remove. It’s the musical equivalent to a Clive Barker novel. It’s hard to believe some of these songs were popular, but take it from me, in my senior year in high school, Lita Ford’s “Kiss Me Deadly” was one of the truly beloved songs. I don’t really think I needed to be reminded of that.
