You're a Wi-nner!

Remember this scene from Boogie Nights? Dirk Diggler and Reed Rothchild are laying down tracks for an album which they mean to be their legitimizing break from pornography. It's the early eighties, and director P.T. Anderson spares no historical details: plenty of red leather, head bands and blow. The music that Dirk and Reed fumble around and strain to create is totally eighties. One of the duos original songs You Got the Touch is a delightfully sharp reference to a substrata--for lack of a better term--of mainstream eighties songwriting, not-dissimilar to the Power Ballad of the early-nineties but significantly more overlooked.

Solipsistic Anthems like Hearts on Fire by John Cafferty, You're the Best Around by JustD and What a Feeling by Irene Cara dramatizing the plights of exeptional underdogs like Rocky, The Karate Kid and the dripping-wet- steel-worker chick from Flashdance, were obligatory in eighties blockbusters.

They show up first in the training montage:
Highway to the Danger Zone...


Then again in the final victory sequence:

You're the best around
nothings gonna ever keep you down...


The lyrics are fairly interchangeable as are the "high-octane" rythms and syrupy guitar solos. Verses that begin with an ultimatum admonishing the hero to take stock of his lilly-livered self:

"You'll never say hello to you/Until you get it on the red line overload."

"Silent darkness creeps into your soul and removes the light of self-control"

end with a clear metaphor commonly dealing with engines, heat or weaponry, instructing the hero in the one way in which they may become at least worthy of the very air they breath:

"Walk along the razor's edge but don't look down, just keep your head."

"Hit the wheel and double the stakes
throttle wide open like a bat out of hell."

No doubt these songs were a manifestation of a castrated, Post-Carter Administration vibe--Greed is Good. Maybe because I don't watch many Jerry Bruckheimer movies these days I've missed the modern equivalent.

My idea is to put together a compilation of these self-actualizing, self-congratulating, solipsistic, fight songs and make myself a million bucks selling it at two-thirty in the morning on Comedy Central.