Thursday, June 15, 2017

Song #9: "The Metro"--Berlin (1983)

Four of the top sixteen songs in our musical journey came from the year 1983, and today's is the second highest ranking.

It's from Berlin, a song originally released two years earlier. But the version I first heard, and immediately fell in love with, was a remake which found its way onto radio, mostly on stations willing to take a chance on songs that didn't fit the "mold" of the current time.

1983? Dominated by Michael Jackson, then by The Police (see Song #16), but you would also hear Dexy's Midnight Runners alongside Billy Joel, and, for awhile, you would hear Terri Nunn and Berlin.

The most success for this song was found, not on radio, but in heavy rotation on MTV, thus, I post the video, which I rarely saw, below. It's the longer, remixed version, by the way.  MTV, as I've noted before, was not in Beaverdam, Virginia then, so radio was still clearly king.

As was a song once I finally recorded it off radio onto an 8-track tape (yes, the stereo my brother generously gave me when he moved to North Carolina in 1982 had an eight-track recorder/player, not a cassette. So, I'd buy old eight-track tapes of any kind and record over them.

Back to this song.

It's the very definition of both haunting, and matching the music perfectly to the "scene of the song". Every second of the song, you feel like you're in a tube in London, or another European city, you feel the motion as well as the emotion, and Terri's vocal work is the cherry on top.

Berlin may have hit it big three years later thanks to the movie "Top Gun", but to me, their pinnacle came when they invited us for a ride on "The Metro".




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