When I Stopped Feeling Self-Conscious About Music

Life Goes On: The Lessons We Learned From Eighties Music takes its title from John Mellencamp’s “Jack and Diane.” Editor Eric J. Shoars compiles 17 first-person testimonials about the personal meaning that Gen-X’ers found in 1980s songs from “Don’t Stop Believin’” to “We’re Not Gonna Take It” to Men at Work’s “Overkill” and Rush’s “Subdivisions.”

For a lot of Shoars’ participants, the songs that resonate now are those that helped deal with an adolescent trauma like their parents’ divorce. (His own meaningful song, having grown up without male role models, is Bonnie Tyler’s “Holding Out for a Hero.”) My contribution to the volume was an essay about Toni Basil’s “Mickey,” not a song in which you might expect to find deeper meaning, but definitely the one that gave me permission to like what I liked.

I don’t believe in liking a song or an artist as a “guilty pleasure.” People say that in music discussions when they like something they think you won’t. I have no such compunction. Music is meant to make people happy, not defensive. The discussion is more fun (and discovery is easier) when tastes don’t match exactly. 

So “Mickey” by Toni Basil is all pleasure, all energy, all rush, no guilt for me. There are certainly people who consider it the cheesiest or most annoying hit of the ’80s. “Mickey” faced a lot of resistance when it was new in 1982. Eventually, it was a No. 1 Billboard Hot 100 hit and a multi-million seller. So be secure in the knowledge that anybody who might want you to feel self-conscious about “Mickey” has long been outvoted.

By the time “Mickey” came along, there was already a lot of polarizing music I liked. Until then, I might have felt guilty about liking the bubblegum hits of the late ’60s and early ’70s. When I was 5, there was the Ohio Express singing “’Yummy Yummy Yummy/I’ve got love in my tummy.” A few years later, there was an international hit called “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep,” of which I own eight different versions. I was a natural audience for those songs as a kid, but I’ve carried them through a lifetime.

I might have also felt self-conscious about liking the ’70s rock band Sweet more than Led Zeppelin. The Sweet broke through in America with the clearly bubblegum “Little Willy/Willy won’t go home,” but more straightforward rockers like “Ballroom Blitz,” “Fox on the Run,” “Action,” and “Love Is Like Oxygen” followed. “Action” actually anticipates the rise of speed metal 15 years later. For that matter, I don’t feel bad about liking the Osmonds’ attempted rockers (“Crazy Horses,” “Goin’ Home”) more than most Led Zeppelin songs.

I should have felt embarrassed about staying with Top 40 radio in the mid-’70s, when the rest of my peers peeled off to FM rock. It wasn’t just bubblegum that kept me there. It was ’70s R&B (for which no hedging could possibly be necessary) and disco (for which none will be forthcoming). There was enough rock for me on Top 40. There were also a lot of “Lost 45s” that seemed kind of trifling to me then — “Come and Get Your Love” by Redbone, “Magic” by Pilot (pre-Ozempic), “Get Down” by Gilbert O’Sullivan — that I came to understand as great radio records.

Many people feel the need to hedge Abba as a guilty pleasure. I’m long past that. I saw the musical Mamma Mia in London on my honeymoon and again when it came to America. I’ve routed business travel through Stockholm to visit the Abba museum. Two years ago, I routed another trip through London so I could see Abba Voyage, the virtual recreation of a concert at the band’s ’70s/early-’80s peak. 

For that matter, I don’t feel guilty about liking Boney M, the Frank Farian-produced (and sung) studio group that preceded Milli Vanilli by a decade. At the time, “rah, rah, Rasputin/lover of the Russian queen” was exactly the kind of song that could be a hit in Europe, but not here. But now, Americans seem to know it too … plus, Lady Gaga quoted from both that song and Boney M’s “Ma Baker” in her early hits.

Sometimes, in discussions about ’70s and ’80s pop, I used to try to make it easier on the other person by announcing I had cheerfully bad taste in music. But I didn’t mean it. What I meant was “you seem like someone who likes dull-but-respectable songs like ‘Broken Wings’ by Mr. Mister, and that’s fine, too.” But I once hedged “Chirpy” that way and I found out that the otherwise-normal guy my age I was talking to remembered it fondly as well. I was peremptorily apologizing for a song we both liked. (“Little Willy,” too, as it turned out.) 

There are songs that might cause one cognitive dissonance now. Sometimes they’re by artists who had hits for five years but were unable to sustain an exemplary life over the course of the next four decades. Sometimes they’re songs whose lyrics wouldn’t be okay now. 

But you shouldn’t feel guilty about liking a song that’s just fun and a little goofy, or a lot. “Mickey” helped me stop apologizing for what I liked. Also, because it took six months to become a hit in America, “Mickey” helped me realize that I had a decent ear for hit songs that would serve me well through my career in the music industry, especially those that other people might be embarrassed to champion.

“Mickey” came along at the very lowest moment both for Top 40 radio in America and the music it played. The Top 40 format had slid gradually off a cliff during the ’70s, particularly as the AM stations that were still a major part of the format were unable to compete against FM rock (or FM radio overall, eventually). 

After 1979’s “disco demolition” and the so-called “disco backlash” (which ended up keeping almost any uptempo R&B music off the radio), Top 40 stations effectively became either Album Rock stations or soft-pop stations. The notion of Top 40 as the “best of everything” format was shelved. The term “Contemporary Hit Radio (CHR)” took hold instead in the industry, because it allowed a station’s version of the hits to no longer include “everything.”

The CHR stations that rocked were bearable, but they didn’t have much reason to exist. They were Album Rock stations with jingles, playing the same Foreigner, J. Geils Band, and Journey hits you could hear everywhere else in winter/spring ’82. 

As for the CHR stations that were really “Adult Contemporary” or “soft rock” stations, they were at their lowest possible point to a college junior who was still trying to like Top 40 at that moment. What was the bottoming-out point? Was it “Through the Years” by Kenny Rogers? The six consecutive hits that Air Supply (“Lost in Love,” “All Out of Love”) had scored by then? “Key Largo” by Bertie Higgins? 

For me, the low point was “I’ve Never Been to Me” by Charlene. That song probably wouldn’t be written now, with its narrator who lectures a stranger for wanting to be more than a “discontented mother and a regimented wife.” Eventually, there’s a spoken interlude where the narrator demands, “Do you know what truth is? It’s that little baby you’re holding. It’s that man you fought with this morning, the same one you’re going to make love with tonight. That’s truth! That’s love!”

“I’ve Never Been to Me” was, of course, written by a man. It was first released in 1977, when a three-way cover battle mercifully kept any one version from becoming a hit. That it became a hit five years later was the doing of then-WRBQ (Q105) Tampa radio program director Scott Shannon. It’s a reminder that I can be outvoted, too.

There were some bright spots in early ’82. It was a great time for R&B music, but it had been in short supply on Top 40 for the last few years. Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical” had just finished its 10 weeks at No. 1. Joan Jett & the Blackhearts’ “I Love Rock & Roll” was a surprise hit, and the only thing that at all sounded like it was the new-wave/girl-group hybrid of the Go-Go’s’ “Our Lips are Sealed” and “We Got the Beat.”

But in spring ’82, the Top 40 format that I persisted in listening to, unlike my peers, was still defined by yacht-rock holdovers. The hits in the UK were a lot better. Disco had never been driven underground. “Going Underground” by the Jam, like punk and new wave overall, was a pop hit, not exiled to college radio. “Don’t You Want Me” and “Tainted Love” were mainstream smashes and finally on their way to Top 40 in the U.S. with the help of the six-month-old MTV. I’d already heard them months earlier thanks to the BBC World Service Top 20 countdown.

The World Service Top 20 was a half-hour version, heard on the BBC’s shortwave station, of its Sunday-afternoon chart show, the UK’s equivalent of Casey Kasem and American Top 40. The host read the countdown of the top 20 songs; only about seven of them were played. That was where I heard “Mickey,” coming into the countdown at No. 11. 

“Mickey” was, in its original form, written by Mike Chapman and Nicky Chinn, the highly successful UK producers who wrote “Little Willy.” I liked a lot of the records they made for better-known-in-the-UK glam rockers such as Mud and Suzi Quatro before Chapman’s American breakthrough as a producer for Blondie, Pat Benatar, Huey Lewis & the News and others. 

The early ’70s “Chinnichap” hits like “Little Willy” were part of glam rock’s big UK tent at the time, alongside T.Rex, David Bowie, and Roxy Music. I liked the layer of confectionary sleaze that Chinn and Chapman gave glitter rock. By the early ’80s, there was almost nothing that was as much fun as “Little Willy” on the radio. Radio programmers were, by 1982, seemingly embarrassed that songs like “Little Willy” or “Magic” had ever been hits.

The Chinnichap predecessor to “Mickey” was an album cut, “Kitty,” by the male group Racey, who had UK hits in 1978-79 with lightweight ’50s-flavored pop. There’s a reason you never heard it. Basil added the “you’re so fine/you blow my mind” chant. And when she switched the gender, she also gave it the “woman in charge” aspect that was still novel when “Physical” was a hit a few months earlier.

When much of America finally experienced “Mickey,” it was on MTV with a video more sophisticated than the average concert clip of the channel’s first year. But I heard it through radio static. On the song’s first week on the countdown, I recall that there was nothing more said about it than title and artist, which was pronounced UK-style. I would go on to hear “Basil” with a long A on American radio, but I still automatically pronounce it the other way, and so do UK DJs when I hear them play it now. 

The next week, I learned about Basil’s Word of Mouth album, whose full-length concept video had just aired on UK TV, helping break the song. (Even in the UK, “Mickey” was about nine months old by the time it became a hit.) Basil’s long career as an actress and choreographer (and, briefly, in 1966, recording artist) was something I didn’t hear about until later. I did know about her dance troupe, the Lockers, because I heard the stories in the mid-’70s about them opening for Frank Sinatra and infuriating his older audiences with what would later become known as breakdancing. But I didn’t make that connection until later either.

I didn’t know who wrote “Mickey” on that first listen either. But I recognized it as kin to “Little Willy” immediately, a ’70s bubblegum record somehow snuck into the early ’80s. Because Basil had collaborated with the band Devo on Word of Mouth, “Mickey” had hip credentials that allowed it to be considered new wave, not schlock pop, at least in the UK. What I liked was the goofy, off-kilter energy. “I Love Rock & Roll” and “We Got the Beat” had their own stomping-and-clapping elements, but “Mickey” felt more extreme.

“Mickey” went to No. 2 in the UK, but was still gone from the top 20 countdown in about five weeks. The hip record store in my college town never carried it as an import. I had to wait until I was in New York on spring break a few weeks later to find it. (There had been enough demand at the import stores that it was hard to find even there.) When I I finally played it for friends, or the program director of my first radio station, they mostly thought it was pretty stupid.

But in Los Angeles, “Mickey” had enough new-wave cred to become a hit on KROQ, the first major Alternative station and, in 1982, the most-influential radio station in America. When “Mickey” finally came out in America in late summer, it crossed over to Top 40 radio in Los Angeles first. But even as it climbed the charts in some cities, it was never played in others. In Radio & Records, which measured only airplay, not sales, it went only to No. 11.

Toni Basil already had a back story that should have made her a major consumer-press presence. Today, there would be thousands of TikTok videos created by users in cheerleader costumes. Back then, “Mickey” had a three-second intro and even when it finally became a hit, I don’t remember DJs saying much about the song at all. I do remember that WLS Chicago’s Larry Lujack made a big deal of refusing to play it, trashing it pretty much the same way he had “You Light Up My Life” five years earlier.

By the time “Mickey” had run its course as an American hit in spring ’83, the pop-music landscape was a different, much more vital place. R&B music was back on the radio thanks to a series of hits that couldn’t be denied: “The Other Woman” by Ray Parker Jr., “Sexual Healing” by Marvin Gaye, then “Little Red Corvette” by Prince and “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson, as “Thriller” became a driving event for the resurgence of Top 40 radio and pop music overall.

By spring ’83, there was so much great new-wave pop music on U.S. that even a few songs that now seem like they were always hits actually had to wait for years to become radio staples — “White Wedding,” “I Melt with You.”  “Every Breath You Take” was brand-new and about to become the song of the summer, the record of the year, and then one of the most unavoidable songs of all time. 

That being the case, nobody much noticed or cared when Basil didn’t have a follow-up hit. New Top 40 stations were signing on all the time in 1983-84, and some of them went back to play “Mickey” because it had barely been on the radio in the market. 

Mostly, though, “Mickey” disappeared from the radio again, regarded as a novelty. When the first all-’80s stations popped up 20 years later, many wouldn’t play it, even though no song seemed more iconically ’80s to me. Other people saw it as a punchline. There was some Band Camp-type start-up whose TV commercials showed an older Clive Davis-type A&R man trying to convince an indie band that “Mickey” was what their hit single should sound like.

To me, “Mickey” was always what a hit single should sound like. Eventually, other acts agreed. Gwen Stefani brought the cheerleaders back, and “Hollaback Girl” had the same revitalizing impact on Top 40 that “Mickey” had two decades earlier. Avril Lavigne’s “Girlfriend” was even more overt in its influences. It was inevitable that the Barbie soundtrack would interpolate “Mickey” directly on Charli XCX’s “Speed Drive.” Last year, Rosé & Bruno Mars’ “APT” did the same. Chinn and Chapman are credited, even though everything that connects “Mickey” to that song comes from Basil’s arrangement, not the original composition.

In 1986, at a time when hip-hop borrowed freely in a time before sample clearances, Run-D.M.C.’s “It’s Tricky” took its cadence and its hook from “oh Mickey/you’re so fine/you’re so fine you blow my mind.” These days, “It’s Tricky” is the most enduring song from the Raising Hell album, more than “Walk This Way” or “You Be Illin’.”

 “Mickey” has endured thanks to listeners who are too young to know that they’re supposed to feel guilty about it. That includes my adult daughter, who heard it in plenty of places growing up. Last week, “Mickey” played about 600 times on American radio. By comparison,0 “Broken Wings” got 1600+ spins. But “I’ve Never Been to Me” wasn’t played at all. So there’s that. 

These days, streaming as much as airplay is the arbiter of a song’s endurance. It’s hard to say with “Mickey,” because the original version hasn’t been available on Spotify for years. Basil recently won the rights to Word of Mouth, so I’m hoping that changes.

In the early ’00s, a colleague interviewed Basil and put me on the phone with her. She expected to hear that I learned the song through the video and that my favorite part was the chant, because that was usually what people told her. But while “you’re so fine/you blow my mind” is, well, just fine. It’s not my favorite part of the song. That would be when she bellows that stretched-out “it’s … guys … like … you, Mickey!” at the end. It’s an explosive moment that you have to listen for, because the song is fading at that point. 

Ross on Radio readers know about the state of Top 40 now. With all of radio challenged by streaming, there are many who think it will never come back, and I can only tell you people said that with certainty in 1982 (or 1992 or 2002). Ironically, there’s a lot of chart music now that sounds like ’70s disco and almost nothing that sounds like Journey.

Thanks to TikTok, there’s plenty of silly music, yet, somehow there’s not enough that I find to be fun or energizing. Streaming has also turned out to be responsible for a lot of painfully earnest music that would have fit right in during 1981-82. As with “Broken Wings,” I’m perfectly capable of admitting when I’m outvoted, and respecting your right to enjoy your own music, however savorless I might find it. Just don’t like boring music only because you think you’re supposed to, and we’ll be fine. 

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