Take It Easy

My iPod loves Take It Easy, the absurdly catchy piece of guitar pop by Andy Taylor (and his website has the greatest name of any website, ever. I'm thinking about changing the name of this place to Beyond Thunder 2). Since I uploaded it a few weeks ago it pops up almost immediately after a reshuffle, guaranteed. It's as if the machine can't wait to hear the song again.

It's a goddamn shame that this song isn't one of the signature tunes of the '80s. It shamelessly rips off T Rex's Bang a Gong but it does it with style and one of the most memorable sets of guitar riffs to come out of that over-amped era. There's even hand-claps and na-na-nas in it, for God's sake. It's like Andy Taylor somehow acquired that guy from Weezer's notebook full of catchy parts from different songs and put it all into this one tune.

I remember the video from '86, too. The song itself was on the American Anthem soundtrack (awesome line from one of the IMDB reviews: "I was an extra in this film, a face in the crowd for the competition scenes. Even then, it was clear that this film was destined to fail.") and even then I was a sucker for a catchy pop song. I remember that, yeah, but I also remember the smoking hot Janet Jones doing flips and whatnot. And then I promptly forgot about the song until well into my married years when Sonya came home with a spare copy of the movie they were selling at Midtown Video. And there at the end of the movie was the video for this awesome, awesome song.