National Lampoon
August 1979
August, 1979, and the top song in the Billboard Hot 100 is 'Bad Girls' by Donna Summer.The Led Zeppelin album 'In Through the Out Door' is released. As author Stephen Davis points out in his 1985 biography of the band, 'Hammer of the Gods', 'the album saves the U.S. record industry from bankruptcy.
The August issue of National Lampoon is out on the stands, and it's a special 'Travel' issue. With P. J. O'Rourke as editor, there is a more snide tenor to the contents, which meant that frequently I laughed out loud while reading this issue.'Negroes of the World' likely would not be tolerated nowadays, but back in '79, the Lampoon could get away with it.
Ted Mann's 'A Girl's Letters Home from Europe' features a brilliant illustration by Marvin Mattelson, depicting an unsavory European male eyeing the naive Young American:Particularly vicious is D. H. Pickering's 'Let's Went to Mexico', which depicts Mexico as land of squalor, misery, and corruption.A 'Foto Funnies' entrant makes fun of Polish males, while 'The Appletons' observes mayhem in church.Let's close with an advertisement for the Ramones film 'Rock n' Roll High School', which was released 44 years ago.........at the time, I didn't pay much attention to it. Only those few hipsters who were Ramones fans went to see the movie. Strange as it may seem, it wasn't until later in the 1980s that the Ramones began to get much attention from rock fans outside the punk world.
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