My Top 1000 Songs #945: My Sharona

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

It's summer 1979. I've just turned 13, had a pretty sweet Bar Mitzvah celebration, life's ok--or at least as ok as it gets for an introverted, awkward boy is as he enters his proper teen years.

And then my parents ship me off for 4 weeks of overnight camp in upper Michigan, a miserable summer that was just a whole whirlwind of suck. (I won't revisit it here; but I shared a personal essay you may find amusing, Reflections On A Life Of Crime.)

The one bright spot? It was the summer of The Knack's "My Sharona." I had brought a cassette of the band's Get The Knack, released that spring, and by mid-summer the single was being blasted out of every woodside cabin, the song's perfectly insistent bassline and horny lyrics perfectly designed for a co-ed summer camp packed with horny adolescents.

Of course, since then a lot has happened. My hormone levels have receded; pop culture touchstones like Reality Bites watered down any personal associations with the song; the trauma of a crappy summer has largely receded but still lingers. And of course, the lyrics (like much of the band's fun but not exactly sexually enlightened early work) are, as they say, problematic. So I don't play the song or the album very often. But, still, come on. It's "My Sharona"!

Live 2005:

Reality Bites scene:

It's the second Weird Al visit this week!

Slowed down 90s indie grind from Veruca Salt.