Friday Morning Videos (The Kickoff): "King of Wishful Thinking"

Well, I started the Friday Pop Songs That Say Something series back in June 2007, and it was enjoyable thinking about and transcribing all those lyrics from the various songs I'd mentally or emotionally relied upon or been inspired by over the years. In the end, though, I kept running out of enthusiasm for the project--I maintained it over the summer, let it mostly languish over the fall and winter, revived it this past spring, mostly stuck with it through late summer, but then it disappeared again. Not a bad run for a blogging feature, I guess--about 26 songs altogether. I'm sure, until The Great and Terrible Day the Internets Die, I'll continue to get occasional Google links from being searching for the lyrics to "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," or whatever. To all you anonymous searchers, I'm glad to be of service.

But now, something new, something lighter, something nostalgic and fun. This Belle Waring post got me to own up to what has, over the past several months, become an enormously pleasing hobby of mine: tracking down old music videos from the 1980s or thereabouts on YouTube. They're all there, or practically all of them...it's a matter of remembering the name of that song that you woke up one morning with the tune on the cusp of your consciousness--or if not the name of the song, then the artist, or a snatch of lyrics, or something. It's all perfectly ridiculous because it's a perfect waste of time, looking for perfectly disposable bits of video art from fifteen or twenty or thirty years ago. So hell, I'm going to document it--right here, beginning today.

Why the title of this feature? Because we didn't have cable growing up, and so my original knowledge of music videos was entirely shaped by Friday Night Videos on NBC, which I would sneak into the living room and watch every week. (By my senior year, I had television of my own doubling as my computer monitor for my Commodore 64 in my room.) Friday is the end of the work week, and who so doesn't want to start their Friday with a little pop fun from a different era? I know I do.

So, for today? Well, the election was about hope, a hope that we all know will likely be dashed, perhaps numerous times, but it got us to vote anyway. And so here, in honor of hoping, is Go West's "King of Wishful Thinking." (See if you can figure out the actually rather clever sight gag at the very end.)