Saturday, January 24, 2015

"What I Like About You" (The Romantics)

If one good thing has come out of the digital age and digital music distribution, it's not having to rely on radio or MTV to dictate when and how often you get to hear music.  If you want to binge watch every video ever made by some band on YouTube or listen to some new track 100 times at work on Spotify and then download it to your phone while riding the bus on the way home, you can do that.  No more sitting and waiting through a bunch of crap to hear the song/see the video that you really want.
Which brings me to my song of the day.
When I was a little kid, my family listened to pop/rock radio a lot.  Monday through Friday, it was on from about 9 in the morning to 6 in the evening.  So I soaked up every new thing that hit the airwaves.  I first heard "What I Like About You" from The Romantics' self-titled album on the radio sometime around 1980, and I loved it.  I wanted to hear the song all the time.  The chunky guitar riff.  The shouted hey! vocals.  The wild harmonica solo, which kind of reminded me of my mom's early Beatles records (I was obsessed with "Love Me Do" as a toddler).  
Radio obliged for a few months, and then the song totally disappeared.  It was as if the Caesars of the broadcast world decided that The Romantics needed to be thrown to the lions and Babs Streisand's "Guilty" should reign victorious and be played a thousand times a day.  (God, I hated that schmaltzy, disco-fied turd of a song even back then.)
It wasn't until years later that I heard "What I Like About You" again on a commercial (Wikipedia and the Interwebs seem to indicate it was a 1990 Budweiser spot, so we'll go with that).  Suddenly, the song was getting airplay again.  MTV even slipped it back into rotation in its late-day video blocks.  I remember seeing the video for the very first time in middle school and being surprised that the drummer, Jimmy Marinos, was also the lead singer on the track.  (Side note: Marinos along with the band's guitarists, Wally Palmar and Mike Skill, wrote the song.)
Anyway, "What I Like About You" was one of the first songs I downloaded from iTunes the moment I got an iPod, and it has stayed on my playlists for the past 10 years.  So now I can hear it anytime I please.  
Suck it, radio.



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