Right There, Right Out -

Right There, Right Out - I remember the baby-boomers yowling in horror when Nike rented the rights to the Beatles' "Revolution" for a commercial.

"It's desecrating our religion", said some. Well, not really, but it came very close; the cult of Lennon was particularly strong among the Baby Boomers (which always confused me, but I always preferred Davies and Townsend). I rolled my eyes; "Oh, those solopsistic boomers, demanding the world revere them and their icons again".

Now, of course, the worm has turned.

K-Mart is using a pseudo-gospel cover of Jesus Jones's 1991 one hit wonder "Right Here, Right Now". And I'm a little steamed. No, not as steamed as the baby boomers were; Mike Edwards and Jesus Jones were icons to nobody. But the song - a wonderful little power-pop nugget - captured the headiness of the fall of the Berlin Wall like no other song of the era.

I saw the decade in, when it seemed
the world could change at the blink of an eye
And if anything
then there's your sign of the times

I was alive and I waited waited
I was alive and I waited for this
Right here, right now

"Big Deal", say the Boomers. Well, yes. It was.

In 1991, my daughter had just been born. And my life's most fervent prayer - that my kids would not grow up under the threat of nuclear annihilation that I did, among the missile fields of North Dakota - was answered. Seeing the Cold War end was more than just current-events fodder. The little piece of my consciousness that always kept itself ready to try to respond, somehow, to the sirens, whether by fighting for life or by trying to adjust my eyes to the incoming flashes, was freed up for other, more productive things.

And while Mike Edwards and Jesus Jones are barely footnotes in pop history, that song is the soundtrack for that epiphany in my life.

And now, it's being used to flog the Blue Light Special.

In my own defense, this doesn't horrify me in the same way that the Nike travesty gut-shot the Boomers. It's pop culture. It's inevitable. Nothing's sacred.

So excuse me while I grit my teeth quietly, and remember a better time.

Posted by Mitch at October 23, 2003 07:57 AM