I Love the '80s

YouTube has everything. I don't know if I could sit through all of Music & Lyrics again, but the hilarious faux-'80s video starring Hugh Grant as half of a group called Pop! (a not so subtle takeoff on Wham!) is available here and does not fail to please me.

Hugh Grant said on Leno that he was, in some ways, the proudest of this movie of out all his movies, and I think I can see why, because it must have taken a fair amount of work for him to do all the singing and choreography. Aside from that, it is an intermittently charming film about a forgotten pop star trying to put his life back together. I actually think it could have been quite good if it had focused on Grant's character and kept the female character supporting; it would have been another About a Boy. Unfortunately, Drew Barrymore's character was insipid and had a somewhat contrived self-loathing plotline about having had an affair with a professor who wrote it up in a bestselling novel. But the supporting character, a teenage pop star named Cora, was a great mishmash of Britney-Jessica-Christina, so it was really a fun musical parody film.

I was thinking about this recently because I also youtubed George Michael singing "Somebody to Love" with Queen at the Freddie Mercury tribute concert, which I think is one of his best performances ever. I remember when it was on the Top 40 countdown with Kasey Kasem, and I recorded it off the radio onto a cassette tape and listened to it over and over, as preteens do.

Kasem, according to Wikipedia, refused to say "I Want Your Sex" when that particular hit of Michael's made the charts, and would only refer to it as "the new single by George Michael." I don't remember this, but I believe it. How nice for DJs that Nas solved that little problem by not giving the album the name he wanted to. The only way to refer to it IS as "the new album by Nas."