History's Dumpster = GLORIOUS trash! Kitsch, music, fashion, food, history, ephemera, and other memorable and forgotten, famous and infamous pop culture junk and oddities of yesterday and today. Saved from the landfill of time...
"I Don't Like Mondays" The Boomtown Rats is a seminal New Wave classic
from 1979. What many pop music fans had forgotten (or never knew) that
the song has it's origins in a tragedy that became a sort of precursor
to the school shootings that occurred during the late '90s that led to
the shootings at Columbine High School in 1999 to the Sandy Hook Elementary shootings of late last year.
On January 29,
1979 (34 years ago today), Brenda Ann Spencer, a troubled 16 year old girl opened fire from
the window of her house in San Diego to the playground of Cleveland
Elementary School, which was across the street, killing the principal
and a custodian and injuring eight students and a police officer. When
asked why she opened fire, she flippantly remarked, among other things,
"I don't like Mondays", which in spite of the context in which it was
used became a sort of catch-phrase in the early '80s, appearing on
buttons and t-shirts.
Her cold blooded lack of remorse for her
crime at the time was enough to have her tried as an adult and sentenced
25 years to life for the killings. She had been denied parole four
times. Her last parole hearing was in August of 2009 and she will not be
eligible for parole again until 2019.
Charlene originally released this tune on Motown's Prodigal subsidiary
in 1976, but even with anything goes '70s radio (even on the hardcore R&B stations, which were serviced heavily by Motown and where Millie Jackson was NEVER a problem),
those radio programmers had a problem with THIS song.
It referenced
everything from abortion to prostitution in a sort of girl talk over coffee manner, the kind you would overhear coming from a secluded corner booth in the back of a Denny's. The kind of things that would
spell instant career death for not only the person who sang it, but
the DJ playing it.
But if there's one thing I know about pop music (and I can point out many, many more examples),
it's this: The more conservative the country gets socially, the
more outlandishly sexually themed the pop songs become.
It's a natural rebellion.
So when a Florida DJ found this song in
1982 (during the first years of the Reagan administration) and played it on the radio, the phone lines went berserk. So Motown re-released
it.
Where in spite of radio station boycotts of the tune (especially in
the South), the song shot up to #3 on the national radio pop charts in
1982.
