Flashback Friday

"Oh Yeah" by Yello.

This song has been overplayed and is now almost a joke song; in fact, it was on the Simpsons the other night as the tune that Duff Man (as male stripper) was going to "dance" to. My friend Ben liked to make mix tapes for all of his close friends, so I heard it from his mix well before it
was on the Ferris Bueller soundtrack.

Nevertheless, whenever I hear this song played, it makes me think of my highschool-best-friend, Janet. When she turned 16, Janet's parents gave her a cream-colored t-top Firebird. They were immigrants from Korea and I think they were trying to give their eldest child the "American Experience" or something (getting a birthday car was not in my cards, so it always seemed a little social-climber to me, I guess). Anyway, Janet loved driving that car. Sometimes we would just get in and drive just to drive, with no particular destination, like teenagers do sometimes, you know?

Here's where Yello came in. There was this one super-pretentious neighborhood on the southeast end of town called "The Woods of Bailey Hobson" (say it with a nasal just-out-of-new-england-prep-school lilt) where Janet and I made a regular destination on our drives, BECAUSE, holy-F, the houses were just beyond RIDICULOUSLY ENORMOUS!!

To the bass-blaring nonsense that is "Oh Yeah," we would traverse this development screaming
at the top of our lungs things like, " OH MY GOD THIS PLACE IS %*&#^% UNREAL!!" and
"WHY DO PEOPLE NEED THESE &($\^!$ HUGE HOUSES?!!" or just "*$&%^\!^&!!"

An alternate soundtack was 7 Seconds, the Crew album. Janet never bothered to learn the lyrics, so she was just the cutest thing, screaming out random syllables while punching her fist in the air, with passionately angry expression (well, I'm sure we were both doing that). Even so, "Oh Yeah" and driving with Janet are indelibly together in my mind.

Chik...chik-a-chik-a....