30-Day Song Challenge Day 17 – A Song about Being 17

“I think there is a song out there to describe just about any situation.” (Criss Jami)

A friend and long-time loyal blog follower recently sent me a 30-Day Song Challenge meme in the hope that I couldn’t resist taking the challenge and blogging about it. Here’s Day #17 – A Song about Being 17: Steve Perry, You Better Wait.

She was 17, beauty queen
I met her in a magazine

Heart of fire, love’s desire
Reachin’ out higher, higher

Ahhhhh, the aging but still immaculate voice of Steve Perry from his 1996 solo album For the Love of Strange Medicine. Unfortunately, the video is grainy and for some [insert bad word here] reason the beginning and the end of the song are clipped off. Still, it’s Steve Perry.

Honorable Mention: Stevie Nicks The Edge of Seventeen

If you were inclined to think I might have cited a song about my experience of being 17, well, that’s just not the way I relate to music. “Connects with me personally” is way down the list of reasons why I like a song and what black, 17 year-old kid is gonna identify with songs playing on an AM station in rural New York State, anyway?

(I will have changed my tune a bit in tomorrow’s story.)

Besides, at 17 what I cared about most was basketball, and rap songs about hoops (Basketball, Kurtis Blow) or with deep baller references (Jay Z’s “handle like Van Exel” in Beyonce’s Crazy In Love) hadn’t been invented yet.[1]

That said, going back through the charts, I found a couple of songs that struck my fancy then and have stuck with me to this day: Rod Stewart’s Maggie May; and Roberta Flack’s The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face which I still consider one of the most beautiful and evocative songs ever.

I also learned that I didn’t like very much of the popular music when I was 17.

Tomorrow: a song that reminds you of somebody

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[1] And then there’s Canadian Nelly Furtado flirting with Timbaland and shouting out her homeboy (and back-to-back MVP) Steve Nash in Promiscuous: “Hey, is that the truth or are you talking trash?/Is your game MVP like Steve Nash?” About this she said, “I spent two hours making sure Nash got in the song. He grew up in Victoria, at my rival high school, so I had to give him his props! Everybody shoutin’ out these other ballers, we gotta get Steve Nash in a song.” (https://genius.com/96440)