Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

When I was a kid, I played a lot of video games and generally listened to oldies music while I played. A few years later, I became a music junky and started buying CDs, but at that time, radio stations that my peers were not listening to were perfect. I have some constant, nagging (too strong a word) memories. There are specific memories that stand out. One of these took place on a stormy summer night. I was listening to oldies radio and playing Batman: The Video Game , which I had rented from Park Video. I rented so many games over the years, until after high school, when I virtually stopped playing. To be fair, playing the video game is a memory that should not have stuck with me, but it is there, a fragment of more innocent times.  My memory is hazy, and I don't remember any of the songs, but I do remember bits and pieces of the game. Batman could leap from wall to wall, and one of the weapons was a batarang. It was an average sidescroller, but it was not as hard as Battletoa...

A much younger version of myself got the Coming Out Of Our Shells tape as a free Pizza Hut giveaway (I always wanted to be part of Book It, but my school didn't participate) and proceeded to play it far too often even though it was arguably awful. I always used to listen to music and play video games, and I cranked that tape on many days while I played Super Nintendo, going through Super Mario World , Donkey Kong Country , and innumerable game rentals listening to those ten songs over and over again. It was only later when I started listening to Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and a bit later when I discovered Punk and switched over to NOFX, Operation Ivy, and indie stalwarts such as Pavement that the tape fell by the wayside only to be revisited again in a quest for nostalgia twenty years later. The tape is an unsung pop-cultural artifact that was released at the cusp of 90's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtlesmania when everything that was even tangentially turtles-related sold like hotcakes...