Frederick Hidell interviews Halifax rock group, The Stolen Minks

In the journey from being single to being the head of a family, there’s a certain order of events we’re all familiar with.  First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes so-and-so with a baby carriage (with the occasional sitting in a tree k-i-s-s-i-n-g).  But for the music aficionado, there’s another inevitable step wedged between love and marriage:  the arranging of the perfect courtship mix CD.

Almost all songs, particularly love songs, refer to the existence of a person other than the singer: you, she, him. Most of the time the listener assumes this person is an abstraction, the idea of a person rather than an actual person. One can easily interpret the lyrical reference as the life experience of the songwriter distilled to a single concept, elaborated upon, and then re-personalized. Whether or not The Romantics ever actually learned of any secrets when a lover was “talking in [her] sleep” is irrelevant and goes unquestioned.

Madonna’s 1985 single "Material Girl" is undeniably a pop masterpiece. Its driving bass line and hypnotic melodies are the stuff of mainstream major record label dreams. On its release, the song perfectly captured the zeitgeist of mid-1980s America, a time when materialism and conservatism ran rampant. Youth in Reagan-era America were beautifully captured and projected back to themselves through the sitcom Family Ties, where Michael J. Fox’s conservative Alex P. Keating and his consumerist sister, Mallory, were contrasted against their ex-hippy and liberal parents. It is easy to see why Madonna’s song was a hit with an audience who were, for the most part, acknowledged materialists themselves. The song’s lyrics, written by Peter Brown and Robert Rans, exuded honesty and truth about cultural attitudes at a certain time and place in American history.