Word: teens
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Chronicling the life of 1950s teen-idol Ritchie Valens (Lou Diamond Phillips), La Bamba is an ode to the American middle-class dream. The film opens with the Valenzuela family, a group of Mexican immigrants, working as California migrant workers...
...song's Other Woman sounds like a little girl lost in faded rapture. She stands up to the string section in that anthem of enlightened egotism, Greatest Love of All, finding the prettiest weave of velvet and voltage. Then the synthesized percussion starts blasting, and she escalates into purring teen ecstasy for How Will I Know and her new hit I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me). This is infectious, can't-sit-down music, and her performance dares the listener not to smile right back...
...Blacks cohabited with whites on the Top 40; boys packing sexual threat in their jeans shared the bill with girls tenderized in lacquer and lace. The mood could be tender too. On the radio, a slow tune just naturally followed an up-tempo number; it was the heartbeat of teen America. The 19-year-old Aretha Franklin could take a Broadway spiritual like Meredith Willson's Are You Sure and transform it into a righteous steeple raiser. Baby, that was rock and roll...
...never went back. The jazz inflections of Nina Simone and Sarah Vaughan enriched the vocabulary of pop. The megaton voices of Jackie DeShannon, Dusty Springfield and Timi Yuro lent powerful shadings to love songs. And the girl groups -- all the -elles and -ettes, the Supremes and Shangri-Las -- kept teen pulses surging to an irresistible beat. It made for a varied, vigorous music, in the golden age of chanteuse...
...daughter in between poised to destroy the black widower. Donald E. Westlake based his sleek script on the case of a New Jersey serial killer. Director Joseph Ruben brings his no-nonsense classicism to what could have been just another tabloid horror story. And Schoelen is the most appealing teen in recent movies. But the triumph is O'Quinn's. With his a- mite-too-wide smile, unctuous pieties and neatly calibrated spasms of rage, he creates a paradigm head of the postnuclear family: an evangelist of father love and blood lust...