Songs of '83 Special: "I Melt With You"

This series is based on the Top 40 Billbord charts of 1983, and my memories of what I heard on the radio that year, and not much else. But for "I Melt With You," I need to bring in a little bit more.

I don't know when I first heard Modern English's sole American radio hit, a single from their 1982 album After the Snow. I don't think it was in 1983. But I do know that by sometime in 1987 or 1988, when I was a freshman at Brigham Young University and experiencing a semblance of independent adult life for the first time, I went out one night to see a friend play in a local band, and in a set that included perfectly adequate covers of Echo & the Bunnymen, The Psychedelic Furs, and other staples of what everyone was referring to as "college rock," they played this song. And I suddenly realized that I'd heard it for years--I couldn't remember when I first did, but by that time it was part of the background of my mind, one of the essential Second British Invasion tunes. This fine example of what one reviewer called Vaguely Apocalyptic Pop, with its acoustic guitars, keyboard synth-effects, and ruminations about a love that will stop the world--it was, I realized that night 36 or 37 years ago, perhaps the greatest New Wave rock song of them all. Where did it come from, I wondered?

The answer is a movie, which I also don't remember seeing when it was first released, but is of course one of the essential texts of the early 1980s, the first visual codification of the Valley Girl stereotype that Frank Zappa had invented the year before, and which we all somehow knew we were supposed to mock (but also, of course, be vaguely jealous of). "I Melt With You" didn't have much impact on the UK, but somehow certain American radio stations picked it up as an import, one of which was surely Pasadena's KROQ, from which the leap to appearing on the soundtrack of Valley Girl, which was released in American theaters 40 years ago today, was easily made. And from there, the song began to seep into the broader pop consciousness, if not the pop charts--while popular on some rock stations, "I Melt With You" never was close to being a Billboard hit, not in 1983 nor when Modern English re-recorded and re-released it in 1990. Which I guess is just evidence that, as useful a heuristic it is for this list, I can't rely upon the Billboard charts, much less my memories, for everything.

Anyway, here's Modern English's original video, and the montage where the song was played from the movie (which isn't bad, but isn't any kind of masterpiece of its genre either). Sing along, everyone.