VH1 Classic: Best Thing Ever

VH1 Classic's series All Request Hour is the greatest thing ever. Way better than penicillin. Penicillin can't give you Debbie Gibson, late-era Genesis, and post punk Joan Jett, can it?

I really can't think of any other way you're going to get Jesus Jones and pre-Prince of Thieves Bryan Adams on primetime. Can you?

So as I sat home tonight, I kept one eye on VH1 Classic and one eye on my new Google Desktop Index. Yes, I gave in to the promise of near-instant searches of data on my own hard disk. I gave Windows XP's Indexing Service a shot, and it failed to wow me. Now Google gets a chance. We'll see how it goes.

All Request Hour is truly amazing. I consider myself to be in that group of Americans that rests between "cultured bon vivant" and "love those tractor pulls". I like live theater. I have never watched an episode of The Simple Life or CSI. I don't recognize most of the bands on the radio these days. I can hear in my head how the part of Beethoven's Fifth goes after the first eight notes. And yet all it takes is one Warrant video to draw my complete attention. It's "Heaven". And darned if I don't remember the words. A single half-second shot of the band performing at a concert and it triggers something in my brain long laid dormant. I blurt out to no one in particular: "This must be from Dirty Rotten Filthy Stinking Rich." I didn't even own Dirty Rotten Filthy Stinking Rich, but damned if I couldn't place this song on it.

And here's the thing: it wasn't "Hmmm, what album was this on? Was it something-something 'rich'? Lemme think." No. I knew what it was, as surely as I knew that it was a weaker album overall than Cherry Pie. Cherry Pie had, in addition to the titular track, "Uncle Tom's Cabin", "I Saw Red", and "Blind Faith", which made it just a much more solid work from start to finish, even if "I Saw Red" and "Blind Faith" were the same song. Half point deduction, Warrant. Sorry.

Who knew that a VH1 show could spontaneously evoke such vivid memories? And now, if you'll excuse me, I have Falco's "Der Kommisar" to attend to. (Falco, by the way, died in a car crash in Europe. He was awaiting the inevitable return of rock music in the U.S.)