Wednesday, July 31, 2013

My Lifelong Goal Achieved



I accomplished a lifelong goal Tuesday when I discovered the name of the song at the beginning of this video, the intro to DTV, Disney Channel's 1980s response to MTV, back when MTV played music. Disney Channel was big into responding to stuff in those days, for instance creating Mousercise as a response to Jazzercise.

Anyway, that intro song was always one of my favorites, and my adoration of the tune only increased when my beloved Phoenix Suns adopted it as their pre-tip-off jingle. Nothing gets me as pumped up as that song. Not "Eye of the Tiger," not "You're the Best Around," not "We Will Rock You."

The song was an instrumental, and had no words, so I would create my own:

Get ready

Get ready

So excited that I can't hide it, 

I'm coming into,

I'm sliding into,

The danger zone.

Didn't ever think that I'd find you 

And now that I have we are walking on air.

Didn't even think that I'd find you

And now we are walking on air

Yes the air

Way up there

In the air

Oh the air

Yes the air

Oh the air

Oh the air

Woo!

Ahem.

I needed this song. And to get the song I needed to know what it was called. The closest I could get to owning it was to dig up YouTube videos like that one and listen to snippets of it. I scanned the comments, hoping someone entranced under a similar spell would have already have done the work for me and have been willing to share the results.

No luck.

I embedded the video on Facebook, begging anyone to give it a listen and see if they could deduce the song's title.

Crickets.

Google, as powerful as it is, failed me in my decades-long search for salvation. No matter how I searched, no one seemed to know the title of the song.

And then, by some miracle, I found my answer through Shazam, a smartphone app that listens to bits of music and identifies the songs from which they came. I'm pretty sure I'd tried to Shazam the song before, but had no luck. I indulged a fleeting hope that maybe somehow, some way, Shazam had updated its database enough to include my Moby-Dick of instrumental magic.

The first time I used Shazam, it came up empty. But I would not take no for an answer. I gave it another try. And my perseverence was rewarded. The sweet result the app yielded was that the song was "RPM" by Network Music Ensemble, and was part of the "After School Rock" album.

I was afraid that Shazam was toying with me, but sure enough, a click of the sample listen button confirmed the answer to be the truth. I joyfully handed Amazon 99 cents in exchange for my childhood appreciation that had festered into a lifelong obsession.

Then I listened to the song about 20 billion times in a row. sometimes just appreciating the song, other times humming along, and occasionally belting out my made-up lyrics along with the music. I was content.

And then Caesar wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer.

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