I'm a sucker for lists, as I've stated many times. I'm such a sucker that I always find myself stuck watching MMM's "Listed" even if it's a list that I've already seen (plus, I like staring at Karina Huber's chest). Today, it was the "10 Best and 10 Worst of the 80's", which they seem to replay every single week. And every week, their choices appear dumber.

The 10 worst includes luminaries such as MC Hammer, Jack Wagner, and Rick Astley. First of all, let us all be in agreement that one cannot create novel criticism against the 80's on the basis of bad hair, clothes, and dancing. Yes, Hammer's dancing looks ridiculous viewed through the lens of 2004, but so do the dance moves in any 80's video by a performer without the last name "Jackson". I can barely look at video footage of the Smiths in their early days without having to shield my eyes from their hair. Everything about the 80's looks cheesy now, take it as a given and move on. Hammer was crap for a million reasons other than his dancing and his clown pants.

Jack Wagner was a one-hit wonder, but there were zillions of those in the 80's so that's not why he's on here. It's because he was a crossover star and somehow MMM equates "crossover" with "embarrassing", which is ludicrous because they get plenty of airplay from J.Lo and Hilary Duff these days. A soap star showing up in the charts for six months on the back of a lone corny ballad mega-hit hardly characterizes him as a prominent embarrassment over an entire decade.

Rick Astley is crap, but tell that to the millions of teenagers who voted for John Stevens last week on American Idol.

Number 1, predictably, was Milli Vanilli. Have any artists in recent memory gotten more of a raw deal than MV? Of course, they are on this chart for exactly one reason : the lip-synching. Without it, they'd have been allowed to fade away in peace just like all the other musical acts that got turfed by grunge. They'd have their late 80's number ones, the millions of albums sold, the relatively disappointing 1991 follow-up, and a quiet post-grunge retirement until showing up as judges on "Deutschland Sucht den Superstar" (note that if you replace "Superstar" with "American Idol", you get Paula Abdul's career to a tee).

MV had good things going for them, namely, the songs were good and they were strong, charismatic performers. The former were provided for them, whereas Rob and Fab's sole task was to put 100% into becoming the latter and selling themselves as stars, a task which they handled extremely well. They were hardly the first artists to employ vocal "ringers", even though you'd because any discussion on lip-synching post-1991 begins and ends with MV. One of their only defenders at the time was no less than George Clinton, who pointed out that ringers were nothing new in black pop (I take him at his word, although I'm not certain precisely which artists he had in mind, the usage of ringers is in itself undisputable). Phil Spector frequently had Darlene Love sing on other artists records (most notably, the Crystals didn't sing a single note on some of their huge hits). On a related note, Spector's "Wrecking Crew" played nearly every note on hits by the Byrds, the Beach Boys and the Mamas and the Papas (among MANY others), while sometimes those bands themselves happily mimed along on their instruments during their "live" appearances on TV shows but no disrespect is aimed their way due to this.

Ah, but that's ages ago, that stuff just doesn't happen anymore, right? It's like with baseball post-1920, Pete Rose is pretty much the only prominent gambler in the game, so of course the attention is focused on him. How we forget that both Black Box and C&C Music Factory employed ringers at the same time as MV. Black Box had a skinny, attractive singer pose as the lead for "Ride on Time", and were later sued by the actual, fat, unnattractive singer once the song became a big hit. Both these acts were nominated for Grammys THE YEAR AFTER the lip-synching scandal, but the Best New Artist award went to the impressively bland Marc Cohn instead of one of the massively popular ringerified groups. But nobody remembers this stuff now, because the Grammys were never awarded (and therefore couldn't be revoked) and nobody from those bands died a pitiful death from a drug OD.