Roxette’s Listen to Your Heart.

Just DO IT. Listen for any irregularities or palpitations. Her plea is so impassioned. How could you not?

This smells of a song picked up in a GAP dressing room as he reluctantly tried on a pair of new jeans: Duran Duran’s Rio.

Does anyone else read the gratuitous nudity and sexuality as a desperate attempt to mask a homosexual predilection? Duran Duran themselves are as pretty as the ladies featured in this and the interspersed shots of made-up ladies with equally made-up band members starts to read like a beauty pageant, with Duran Duran clearly pulling away in the “Beauty” category. I mean— did you see the hair? My suspicion is that Duran Duran’s curling irons were the only phalluses (phalli?) to see much action that day.

Tim and Eric’s Get Your Poke on

I think romance may have inspired this little ditty.

To reiterate a comment left on the video page: “Every time someone pokes me on facebook, I’m posting this on their wall.”

Excellent idea, don’t you think?

The Jackson 5 singing I’ll be there and beautiful Diana Ross doing an intro.

I don’t remember the circumstances that put this song in Mike’s head. I do know every time I hear a Jackson 5 song with a young Michael singing it conjures up images of snide Martin Brasheer encouraging Michael to do outlandish things for the documentary he hosted called “Living with Michael Jackson,” such as climbing trees and holding imaginary dialogues with his life-sized Peter Pan statues, only to express his disgust and shock at such behavior in the voice-over narration added later. I’m not sure MJ is devoid of any fault, but Brasheer sure earned his stripes as a DICK in my book. My book of dicks, that is— yet unpublished.

After approximately an hour of restlessness, racking our brains to identify the riff Mike kept humming to himself, it finally came to me.

I doubt he could have chosen a more obscure riff from the Ghostbuster’s theme  song to repeat on a loop, the short, ascending keyboard of the chorus. The song is difficult to identify lacking a reference to “I ain’t ‘fraid of no ghosts” but  we managed  to triumph for the sake of Tumblr blogging victory. There was a modicum of celebration, followed by more humming and chants of “Ghostbusters!”

He began singing this “Simpsons” jingle to himself in traffic stuck behind an especially slow-moving city bus. The Pittsburgh bus drivers are notorious for their “fuck it” attitude towards both stopping at red lights and pulling over to the right when picking up and dropping off riders. In classic PGH bus driver form one sat for a solid minute blocking the flow of traffic, while staring with self-satisfaction into their rear-view mirror at the gridlock collecting behind them. One of the glossier face captured in that mirror, was Mike chirping the crescendo: “moooonoooraaaaiiil.”

Summer’s “MacArthur Park” references a karaoke trip we embarked on years ago, where we searched in vain for a melodramatic Donna Summer song about a cake left out in the rain. Quite possibly one of the most lyrically bizarre songs that was commercially viable, Richard Harris’ rambling opus as sung by Summer malingers, a cake forfeited to the elements:

“MacArthur’s Park is melting in the dark,

All the sweet green icing flowing down.

Someone left the cake out in the rain.

I don’t think I can take it ‘cause it took so long to bake it

And I’ll never have that recipe again, oh, no.”

Summer’s version leaves out some of the most striking lines from Harris’ original, including this  gem:

“Between the parted pages,

And we were pressed in love’s hot, fevered iron,

Like a striped pair of pants.”

Kudos, Harris, for likening hot, feverish love to striped pants, a truly original simile if ever I heard one. I feel like Summer’s version (though high in the camp-o-meter) suffers a severe loss with the omission of this haunting line.

I’m fairly sure what spurred this getting stuck in Mike’s head was a discussion of what female celebrities made an impression on him in his youth, among them was the requisite teen-slut-next-door Christina Applegate, Tiffany Amber Thiessen and of course Liv Tyler and Alicia Silverstone a la those odd Aerosmith videos that featured the latter two engaged in hi jinx and drama-making. In this song, however, the video suffers a dearth of hot ladies and instead all we’re given is rambunctious, hook-spined old Edward Furlong in Aerosmith’s “Living on the Edge.”

And on a side note, there’s something disconcerting about the fact that Steven Tyler can fit his junk comfortably in a single cupped hand at :40 that should have had him reconsidering putting this down on film to live on in perpetuity.

Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” brings us back to the glorious days of early music videos. You may want to rewind a few times to fully enjoy the attitude he’s giving at 0:19: “No the choo choo does NOT go into the food tunnel!” Overall, I’m pretty confident I could take anemic Marc Almond any day of the week.

This next song and accompanying video are pretty remarkable for a few reasons. 1) We were well outside of the Christmas season when he began singing this to himself. 2) The vast number of artists that cover this song, from Manhiem Steamroller, to Bing Crosby and David Bowie, to Mike’s personal least favorite, Bob Seger is pretty staggering. 3) The fact that there is a wealth of videos just like this, where folks synchronize their Xmas lights to a given song. This one in particular, represents an attempt by the Rodriguez family in 2006, that was revisited again, and perfected in my opinion, in 2010. Bob Seger turns the page on his whiskey-soaked version of “Little Drummer Boy.”