SoTD: Urban Dance Squad “Deeper Shade of Soul”

When I was a kid, I was hopelessly uncool. My clothes were bad. My hair was bad. My glasses were god-fucking-awful. I was also out of touch with a lot of pop culture because my parents heavily restricted what I was allowed to watch and the music to which I could listen. I remember being shamed by my peers because I hadn’t seen Top Gun (I was only allowed to watch G rated movies) and couldn’t prove that I knew any Bon Jovi lyrics (getting caught watching MTV meant grounding). At a certain point, I decided I’d had enough and started disobeying the Intolerable Acts handed down by my parents. I started sneaking in an hour or two of MTV in the afternoon before my mom came home from work. I was always careful to cover my tracks by surfing through several other channels when I was done so she couldn’t hit the “Last” key on the remote and see that I’d been immersing myself in banned material.

This song brings me back to those days of trying desperately to educate myself in what was cool. I would have been in 8th grade when this video was in the MTV rotation, in the height of my most awkward phase. Ultimately, my parents’ well intended sheltering backfired in a big way. Once I got to college, I made it my mission to sample everything that was forbidden as quickly as possible, and ultimately it was my undoing. After two years at Stonehill, I had gotten in so much trouble that I was barred from living on campus, which effectively ended my career there. While the blame for me going completely off the rails is absolutely mine, I often wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t grown up in a Catholic family full of Thou Shalt Nots.