As some here know, I am a big fan of 80's music. I have a nice collection of 80's music that is constantly growing. But there were some songs that for years I have been hunting down and had very little success in find, till recently.
By late 1980's I was living in Puerto Rico after living the first 8 years of my life in New Jersey. It was not an easy transition from the city life to a farm-like atmosphere. Living in my small town was like living in a almost poverty like conditions. Things were just a few decades behind in those areas but not that bad. I eventually adjusted to the simply life.
When I was in my teen, the graduating class for Middle and High school would do parties on the weekends to collect money for their graduation parties. They would rent a local hall and a decent or really good DJ and charge a couple of bucks at the entrance and we all would have a blast dancing the night away. I was about 14 or 15 when my mom started giving permission to go dancing and staying till out about 1:00 AM. She had a lot of trust in me and I never gave her any reasons not to. I always made sure I made it home on time.
During those years a very interesting style of music started flourishing in Puerto Rico to the point that many DJ's and singers around the island began to create their own songs that we would jam to at these parties. At the time the music was know as New Wave and House music. A lot of the music was from Europe and it had some great beats. Ironically, considering I was one of the very few in my town that spoke English, I didn't always understand what they songs said but then not all the artist were singing in English either. There were some who were Italian and others who I don't have a clue where they were from but they music was awesome either way.
At the age of 16 I left Puerto Rico and sadly enough this great music as well. For years I have tried to find this music, the artist who created them, even clips but had very little luck. I was able to find a song here and there but unlike today where greatest hits from various artist can be found on CD's like "Now Vol (1 thru 100)" or "Greatest (rap, rock, metal, dance, etc) music of 2007", the music I am looking for was mostly found on 12" records and are not easily found online. Not to mention I never bothered to learn the artist name or name of songs.
Just a few days ago I decided to hunt down these songs again. This time I decided to use a few new tools I didn't have before and before I knew it my luck had changed. Between google.com and youtube.com I was able to find some songs from the few lyrics I could remember. Then youtube.com was able to provide me with the audio for the songs conferming my findings. I then proceeded to seach for the MP3s and have been lucky so far to find them all. Thanks to youtube's "related video" feature, I was also able to find songs I could not remember but once I heard it all quickly came back to me and my collection got bigger. My only problem was I had 4 or 5 specific songs I was looking for. These were the songs that got stuck with me all these years and were the songs that got me searching. For some reason I could not find these songs at all but I did not give up for I had already found some great gems and I knew if I keep looking I would eventually find them. Connecting one video to another I was able to find songs I could not remember, i fugured I would eventually stumble upon these songs on youtube.com, and rest assured, I came across one of them. I was so excited, the song could not download fast enough. Hearing the song brought back such detailed memories of my youth it was almost scary.
Still the search for the other songs yielded no results and I began to get frustrated. It seems the only solution at the time was to travel back to Puerto Rico and try to find people who knew about these songs and where to find them, I had already tried this when i was in PUerto Rico a couple of years ago but I didn't really try hard. Then it hit me. Why not ask those people on youtube.com who posted the videos with the songs to see if they could help me and incredible I got a response the next day and could you believe the guy was able to narrow my list of songs down to 1 song missing?
To be able to listen to these songs again has been so great, memories of the girls I danced with, of the few people I could consider friends as a teen, of the good old days of getting down to the beat of the music, it's like taking atrip in a time machine every time I play the music. The only regret I have is I don't have anyone to share this music with that recognizes these songs. Still, it's great.
So, are there songs out there you wish you could hear again but have not been able to get your hands on them? Who knows, maybe someone here can help with that. Nothing like great music to relax to.