Image Credit: BIll Davila/Retna LtdIt’s easy to take shots at the members of boy bands—everything from the lyrics of their songs to their frosted tips seem rather hilarious. But right now, on the heels of the tragic news about the death of LFO lead singer Rich Cronin, put that all away for a minute. It seems appropriate to take a moment to appreciate what this young, gone-too-soon star contributed to pop culture. And even if you don’t believe it, he did contribute to the cultural nexus, especially when you put it in the context of someone like me, who came of age when Rich and his crew were spouting their radio hits.
For me, LFO takes me back to—as clichéd as it sounds—better, easier times. It’s that simple. “Summer Girls” hit during the summer (shocker!) I was a soon-to-be high school junior who was working as a cake decorator in a local bakery. My friends and I were ensconced in Abercrombie & Fitch already, so the line about Cronin liking girls (and maybe boys, I could hope?) who “wore Abercrombie & Fitch” was like a little shout out to everyone I knew. My girlfriends squealed with delight, gesturing to their A&F gear and Doc Marten boots, whenever the tune played. Rich and his pals were pros at dropping pop culture bombs into all their songs, as “Summer Girls” featured references to Alex P. Keaton, New Kids on the Block, and Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone. Could you have made a teenager in 1999 swoon more? These were the things that defined our life.
To be honest, most of my friends didn’t even refer to the song as “Summer Girls”—they just called it simply “the Abercrombie & Fitch song.” In short, “Summer Girls,” to me, symbolizes a breezier, worry-free time in my life, where nothing mattered but whose pool you were going to for the afternoon. And it should be noted that whenever “Summer Girls” comes on my iPod mix, I do not hit skip. The song is still rather effervescent and fun, a tribute to what the pop world was like in the late ’90s. See what I mean by giving the video for “Summer Girls”—I mean, “the Abercrombie & Fitch song”—a try here:
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4 8 15 16 23 42. To some, they are just numbers. To Lost fans, they are The Numbers, a sequence of digits seemingly imbued—or accursed—with great power. When Hugo “Hurley” Reyes (Jorge Garcia) played them in the lottery, he became a millionaire. He also became a magnet for bad luck, and his quest for answers ultimately led him to a mysterious island pulsing with maybe-mystical electromagnetic power, drawn by a reclusive and quirky guardian who assigned numbers to all of recruits. The numeral given to Hurley: 8.
