So the night after my escort adventure, I pulled out my HX or my Next or whatever, determined that the area with the most gay bars in it was Chelsea, and made a beeline for Champs, the brand-new gay sports bar on 19th Street.
My people must exist in New York, I figured, I just have to find them. Simpson’s white Ford Bronco onto the northbound 405.Īnyway, long story short, this is how we know who Kim Kardashian is.įor all Erasure’s many accomplishments, I will forever associate this song with “ Robot Unicorn Attack,” and I have to imagine they’re happy with that. I, however, was a restless soul, determined to find peace. And so it was that on the second such Friday, while I was at some unlimited-draft-beer happy-hour sports-bar nightmare with the small group of people I’d decided I did like, the bartender took a phone call, said, “You’re kidding,” and immediately switched all the televisions away from NBC’s broadcast of Game 5 of the NBA Finals over to CNN, where Al Cowlings had just pulled O.J. On the Friday of my first week in New York, everyone whom I’d met and decided I did not like - to a person - said, “I’m going to the Hamptons.” That’s the beauty of New York City on summer weekends: It’s like the Rapture, if God had awful taste. He pulled a similar spelling trick with his previous single, “Getto Jam,” which you may recognize as the exact same song as this one.
Here’s the deal: This song is actually called “Sweet Potatoe Pie”, but the chyron within the video spells it the correct way, and I am so petrified that someone out there might think I don’t know how to spell potato that I am going against Domino’s wishes and doing it properly. If you told me the first few seconds of this video were hidden-camera footage of Juliette Lewis just going about an average day, I would believe you. Not bad, but everyone knows “Ken Lee” from Bulgarian Idol is the crucial “Without You” cover.ģ5. I showed up, eyes bright, tail wagging, and immediately identified a much larger problem: “young entrepreneurial crowd” meant “male prostitutes.” I nursed one Bud Light, received no cash offers, and went back to Dorrian’s, where an idiot like me belonged. There was only one, and it was down on 59th Street, but its write-up caught my eye: “Older gay men mix with a young, entrepreneurial crowd.” Young businessmen? Why, I ’m in advertising, I thought.
Immediately, I identified a problem: I lived on the Upper East Side, the area in Manhattan with the fewest gay bars. So I picked up a copy of HX, or Next, or whichever tiny gay magazine you would pick up in 1994, and flipped straight to the bar listings. First order of business: Meet other gay men. In June of 1994, I had just graduated from college and moved to New York City to build a new life for myself. It’s like if Thelma and Louise had been written by Bud Bundy. In 2014, “Crazy” is - by a 3-to-1 margin - the most-viewed video on this list, and it’s not hard to see why: A pre- Clueless Alicia Silverstone and a pre– Empire Records Liv Tyler escape Catholic school (via a window in the “GIRL’S” room ), change clothes in a moving convertible, exchange clothes in a gas-station photo booth, then immediately climb a stripper pole. Which would you rather watch? I THOUGHT SO. He also released two different videos for it: one with him in a gangsta-style Oakland Raiders getup, and one with him in a leopard-print bikini bottom that is stretched to its very limit. Dre and the booty fixation of Sir Mix-a-Lot. So he released this track, with the sinuous synth line of Dr. Speaking of credibility, after “Addams Groove,” Hammer was starving for it. It didn’t chart, because you can’t get the word faggot on the radio unless you’re a straight person using it as a pejorative just ask Dire Straits and Eminem.
And then, with a mixture of credibility and name recognition at her back, she led off her next album with “Leviticus: Faggot,” a exploration of homophobia within the African-American family unit that managed to be terrifying, heartbreaking, beautiful, and danceable all at the same time. After she made waves with Plantation Lullabies and its viciously sexy first single “If That’s Your Boyfriend,” John Mellencamp gave her a leg up on this Van Morrison cover. As we will soon discover together, it involves a few pumps, a few bumps, and at least one grind, all of which are perpetrated by then-jailbait Alicia Silverstone and Liv Tyler. To find out how different that era really was compared to today, I’m using this installment of my Somewhere in Time column to set my DeLorean GIF on a crash course with the Billboard singles charts of June 1994. Both events seem like they could have happened just yesterday or, well, precisely 20 years ago. This next week marks the 20th anniversaries of The Lion King and the ubiquitously televised white Ford Bronco chase involving murder suspect O.J.