1985: The Year In Top 40 Hits (Week 4: 26 January 1985)

Strawberry Switchblade, Alison Moyet, the last good Thompson Twins single, and a mild mashup of The Skids and Magazine

Photo by Harrison Qi on Unsplash

Sometime around Christmas 1982, when I was 13 years old, I got my ear pierced in a store in Horizon Park Mall in Longmont, Colorado. My left ear: to suburban teenagers in the 1980s, it mattered greatly which ear boys got pierced, the theory being that if your left ear was pierced, you were straight, and if your right ear was pierced, you were gay. I was the first boy at Northeast Junior High with a piercing, which pretty much was my only moment as a fashion trendsetter as a teenager. My hair, back when I had it, was flat and baby-fine and would never maintain a particularly interesting style, and even if I had been particularly interested in clothes, my excessive height meant that nothing really cool ever came in my size.

What I had not known when I made that impulsive step was that within the next year, my family would move three times, the first two to small towns where the left/right dichotomy had not yet reached. In Russell, Kansas, that simple silver stud was one of the main reasons why I was punched more school days than not. In Levelland, Texas, I was asked to remove it more than once by school administrators, who were…