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It Was the Heat of the Moment: My Favorite Songs the Year I Turned 16
1982 was a hell of a year for music
I love a good writing prompt, even when it shows up unexpectedly and completely derails what I’m working on at the time. I’m starting to think that Pierce McIntyre over at Plethora of Pop has set up a lawn chair in my head, given the number of times he’s thrown out a challenge that made me forget everything else until I finished it. It helps that we are the same age and thus he knows which buttons to push, which is exactly what he did with his latest challenge: what were your favorite songs when you were 16 years old? You can read the prompt (and his answer to it) below:
When I read the subtitle, I thought this was going to be a slam dunk: at 16 my favorite songs would include classics like “Born to Run” (duh), “Even the Losers,” “Shoot to Thrill,” “Kashmir,” and any number of 70s hits. But then he threw us a curveball. It had to be songs that were released the year you turned 16, which for both me and him was 1982. That changed the list completely; I couldn’t include anything from Born to Run or The River or Back in Black or Led Zeppelin IV or even Beauty and the Beat (that GoGos masterpiece came out in 1981).
How in the hell, I thought to myself, am I going to find 16 favorites from Ronald Reagan’s second year in the White House? As it turns out, the problem wasn’t finding enough songs, it was in deciding which ones I had to leave off; 1982 was a far better year musically than I had remembered, though in my defense it was 40 years ago.
I culled it down though, reluctantly leaving off songs that were ubiquitous in 1982 like the Scorpions “No One Like You,” The Clash’s “Rock the Casbah,” and Willie Nelson’s “Always on My Mind.” What remains gives you a fairly accurate view of who I was at 16, at least with all the earlier classic rock removed.
Normally for a prompt like this I will include one or two videos and then a full playlist at the end, but in reading Pierce’s article I realized…
