Dispatches from the Creation Wars

Balko on the Dobler Effect

Posted by Ed Brayton on February 16, 2006
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I generally love Radley Balko’s blogging, but this post leaves me with mixed feelings. He links to a Washington Post article about Lloyd Dobler, the John Cusack character in the movie Say Anything, a movie I really liked and recently watched again on TV. But then Balko writes:

Stuever looks at the continuing Lloyd Dobler phenomenon, or how Say Anything not only put John Cusack first in the heart of a many a Gen-X woman, but regretably cemented the dreadful “In Your Eyes” as a mix tape staple.

And here I have to disagree. “Dreadful”? In Your Eyes is, in my humble opinion, the finest love song of the rock era, and I thought that before it was featured in Say Anything. It’s just a brilliant song, from a brilliant album (Peter Gabriel’s So). The drumming of Manu Katche alone makes this one of the transcendant songs of the last 25 years (and if you haven’t heard the live version from Secret World Live, go find it).

On the other hand, Balko makes up for it by linking to the website of the Lloyd Dobler Effect, a Washington DC-based band named after the Cusack character. This is a band I discovered recently when searching for an entirely different band (they have a song with a similar name, so it showed up and the name alone made me download it). Very good band.

And while we’re talking about Say Anything, what on earth happened to Ione Skye? With that movie and the vastly underrated The Rachel Papers, this girl had star written all over her. Next thing you know, she’s doing “women in prison” movies with Anne Heche. And do women in prison really take that many showers? But I digress…

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Comments

  1. #1 Dave
    February 16, 2006

    ” In Your Eyes is, in my humble opinion, the finest love song of the rock era”

    Uh, Layla? Sweet Child O’ Mine? Etc., etc., etc., ad infinitum.

    Don’t get me wrong. So is a seminal album. But In Your Eyes as the “finest” love song of the rock era?

    No.

    Also, I want to know what happened to Sloane Peterson, of Ferris Bueller fame.

  2. #2 oolong
    February 16, 2006

    Lift that radio way up over your head and embrace the inner Lloyd in you.

  3. #3 386sx
    February 16, 2006

    Uh, Layla?

    Blech.

    Sweet Child O’ Mine?

    That one was okay for the first fifty times I heard it.

    REO Speedwagon had some cool ones.

  4. #4 Ed Brayton
    February 16, 2006

    REO Speedwagon had some great tunes, all before 1978. After that, they put out nothing but drek. I had the brutal experience of being dragged to see them in the mid 90s at a county fair. I’m still irritated by it.

  5. #5 Pieter B
    February 16, 2006

    With the exception of some country-music icons and some really big counties, if you go to see a band at a county fair you have no one to blame but yourself.

    [Insert snide comment about the silliness of arguing the artistic merits of various forms of popular music here. Not that I don't love a lot of popular music, but in the grand scheme of things . . .]

  6. #6 Ed Brayton
    February 16, 2006

    Pieter B wrote:

    With the exception of some country-music icons and some really big counties, if you go to see a band at a county fair you have no one to blame but yourself.

    And this is doubly true when the band has spent the 15 years prior to the show sucking royally by putting out schlock like “I Can’t Fight This Feeling”. It was brutal.

  7. #7 oolong
    February 16, 2006

    I’ll trade you the REO concert for my Survivor one.

  8. #8 spyder
    February 16, 2006

    Ione’s lost in some altered space that includes Arrested Development episodes and a secondary role in that strange accolade to the Boston Red Sox. Must be something that runs in the family; didn’t her father write some nice little love songs?? That said: i am just not one of those people who see a doorway into a thousand churches in any person’s eyes.

  9. #9 386sx
    February 16, 2006

    On the other hand, Balko makes up for it by linking to the website of the Lloyd Dobler Effect, a Washington DC-based band named after the Cusack character.

    Hey that’s some good stuff. (They have some free downloads over at their web page.)

    Right now I think I’m going to go put on some Blink 182 and then some Ozzy just so I can thumb my nose at the snobby people like Mr. Balko, and some others who shall remain nameless who think that “I Can’t Fight This Feeling” is a bunch of schlock. Cheers!

  10. #10 David C. Brayton
    February 16, 2006

    Sloane Peterson from Ferris Bueller? That was the kid who was always sick/Red Wing fan, right?

    He co-stared in Spin City. I can’t remember the character”s name but he was the one the enjoyed sex with any and all women.

    (Ed-Sloane kinda reminded me of Jeff from debate camp-always sniffling).

    I can’t believe someone hasn’t yet mentioned Stairway.

  11. #11 chrisberez
    February 16, 2006

    David C. Brayton:
    No, Sloane was Mathew Borderick’s girlfriend, and she was played by the gorgeous Mia Sarah. Although she seems to have dissapeared, she did have a nice nude scene in “Time Cop” with Jean Claude Van Dame. The only downside is that in order to see it you also have to see Van Dame’s ass, as well as sit through a pretty awful movie (although I still count it in the “so bad it’s entertaining” category).

  12. #12 dswift
    February 16, 2006

    It’s bad form to dis someone else’s favorite love song. Have a heart! If nothing else, irrational obsessions serve as honest warnings.

    That said, I’m with Ed. In Your Eyes is a fine piece of romanticism.

  13. #13 Dave S.
    February 17, 2006

    Pieter B writes:

    With the exception of some country-music icons and some really big counties, if you go to see a band at a county fair you have no one to blame but yourself.

    I saw The Stampeders at a country fair a few years back. Waited all set to hear Sweet City Woman, and damned if they didn’t have the banjo. That song is nothing without the banjo intro.

  14. #14 Troy Britain
    February 17, 2006

    In Your Eyes is, in my humble opinion, the finest love song of the rock era…

    Although, as I recall, I have disagreed with a fair amount of your musical commentary in the past (there’s no accounting for taste), here I definitely agree with you. Good stuff that.

  15. #15 beervolcano
    February 17, 2006

    Can you believe this crap?

    http://www.uncommondescent.com/index.php/archives/831

    I don’t know where they found a creationist writer at the Boston Globe, but he found some guy in China with a Taoist view of evolution saying Darwin is dead.

    Gimme a break.

    “Chen proposed that an underlying principle of �harmony� will someday explain what competition cannot.”

    Read Tao for harmony.

    Some biased parts of the article:

    “The idea that neo-Darwinism is missing something fundamental about evolution is as scandalous to Americans as it is basic to the Chinese.”

    “However, despite their misgivings about Chen�s �harmony� proposal � a mysterious mix of scientific caution, Chinese philosophy, and a decidedly non-Western lack of concern for Darwinian orthodoxy �”

    Yeah, there’s nothing orthodixical about Confusian philosophy, but Darwin sheesh, look out…

    “That still leaves a great divide between Chen, Li and the Chinese media on one side and the mainstream Western view, in which scientists are reluctant to admit that the Cambrian explosion poses a difficult challenge.”

    What scientist is reluctant to admit that studying the Cambrian and Precambrian is anything but challenging?

    Weird biased article for the Boston Globe.

  16. #16 Ed Brayton
    February 17, 2006

    Hi guys. My house has no power after a nasty ice storm, so I’m away for a couple days. I’m at a friend’s house and don’t have the login to post with me, so all I can do is leave a message. I hope to be back up and running by Monday. In the meantime, enjoy your electricity.

  17. #17 WJD
    February 17, 2006

    The drumming of Manu Katche alone makes this one of the transcendant songs of the last 25 years (and if you haven’t heard the live version from Secret World Live, go find it).

    I’ve been reading your blog for several weeks now, having been drawn to your excellent commentary on evolution, politics, law etc., but strangely, it’s music that finally prompts me to step forth and post something. I agree with you on the song, and also about the wonderful Secret World Live. I must give it a listen tonight, it’s been too long.

  18. #18 Jeff Hebert
    February 17, 2006

    Ed wrote, chillingly:

    Hi guys. My house has no power after a nasty ice storm, so I’m away for a couple days.

    Once again, the superiority of Texas is proven. It gets hot here, but you don’t have to shovel heat off your driveway. You don’t have to scrape heat off your windshield to get to work. And heat never, ever drags power lines down under its weight.

    Plus we win national championships, and that’ll warm your heart even in the dead of winter (which lasts for about two days, by the way).

    Now I finally feel better after the “Vince Young Lost the Heisman and Duke Beats Texas” two-step drubbing I took here a while back. Plus without electricity Ed can’t post to fire back! Ah, bliss.

  19. #19 Ed Brayton
    February 18, 2006

    I read the comments above and especially my cousin David’s. Coincidentally, I’m at Jeff’s apartment as I type this. Jeff and David and I were roommates at debate institute back in the summer of 1984. We were voted to have the messiest room in the history of the UofM High School Debate Insitute, mostly because of a block of something orange that somehow ended up under David’s bed, which was identified by one Kelly Wenzler. She was brave enough to get down close enough to it to say, “It’s cheese!”. Ah, memories.

  20. #20 nlandess
    February 18, 2006

    I was actually at dinner with a friend of mine last night when the song In Your Eyes came on the speaker system in the Smokey Bones in which we were eating. I asked him if the fact that I liked the song made me gay.

    He responded that, “…Really, anything by Phil Collins…”

    After correcting him, I was struck by how wonderful of a song it is. I, too, love the Secret World version (although the whole album ultimately disappoints).

    I would, however, have to toss in my 2 cents (how do you make that cents symbol on a standard keyboard? anyone?) for Sweet Child O’Mine for the “finest love song of The Rock Era“. Or maybe “The Rain Song”. As much as I love In Your Eyes, the “finest love song of The Rock Era” should probably be a song that can kick your ass, too. And “In Your Eyes” doesn’t do a lot of ass-kicking. And if we are including songs in the milque-toast category, then “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “Hearts and Bones” and probably a few other Paul Simon tunes probably win over “In Your Eyes”. Or maybe “Blackbird,” or “Dear Prudence.”

    And, while I do admit that one of my most pleasurable guilty pleasures is the song “Keep On Rollin’”, the thought of REO Speedwagon being nominated for “the finest” anything of The Rock Era is enough to make me start throwing things.

    It’s a**holes like me that take all the fun out of lists like this.

    My brother just yesterday sent me the e-mail coonfirmation of his purchase of Hi-Fidelity that is being shipped to me, just because he is sick of my somewhat inexplicably having skipped that movie – being somewhat of a rock snob myself, and also thoroughly enjoying most John Cusak movies I have bothered to see.

    A few years ago, on a lazy Sunday afternoon drive back to my hometown from a weekend road trip, I was listening to some type of “dedication hour” on a local station in upstate NY. A gentleman called in and reported that it was his twentieth wedding anniversary, and he wanted to dedicate a song to the beautiful woman with whom he was so passionately sharing life. He said that they had met at a concert and wanted to dedicate the first song he remembered hearing with her to her now, in honor of the rest of their lives together.

    The song?

    “Stranglehold,” by Ted Nugent.

    I almost drove off the road, laughing.