When You Were Young

It's amusing to see someone reveling and celebrating the formative years of our generation, so I'm strangely pleased by the surprise hit song and video by critically acclaimed rockers Bowling For Soup, "1985," scoring so well with the nostalgia of my teenage years.

Its chorus offers a paean to the pop culture of my transitional years (and that of many Xers):

Springstein, Madonna
way before Nirvana
there was U2 and Blondie
and music still on MTV
her two kids in high school
they tell her that she’s uncool
but she still preoccupied
with 19, 19, 1985

The video incorporations allusions to other timeless clips such as Robert Palmer's "Addicted To Love," George Michael's "Faith" and Whitesnake's "Here I Go Again." Other lyrics mention the girl in the song knowing every word to "Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, even Saint Elmo’s Fire"; hoping "she’d get a hand on a member of Duran Duran"; and asking "when did Motley Crew become classic rock? And when did Ozzy become an actor?"

It's clever stuff, and not the only example. California band The Ataris -- named for a video-game company whose products ate up quite a bit of the free teen-age years of people my age -- unfurled a similar vibe in their 2003 album, "So Long, Astoria." It's an album dedicated to memory, and slips in covert references to the final airplane scene of Say Anything and the Kwik-E-Mart from "The Simpsons." They also cover "Boys of Summer" by Don Henley -- a track that was popular in the mid-1980s.

Suddenly all kinds of pop-culture manifestations from my teen-age years are considered cool again. I haven't figured out whether this is exciting or depressing, but it does show that there is quite a bit of interest in what happened when Xers were coming of age.