If you’ve had the pleasure of knowing me for a while, you undoubtedly understand that I’ve got some pretty dark secrets, superficial though a lot of them may be. Okay, let’s be perfectly honest – the more superficial the dark secrets are, the better they tend to be anyway. Like having a third nipple.* Or spending the first Saturday night of the month dressed up like a young Liz Taylor.** Or having an unhealthy fascination with something that’s ever so unfashionable.

This last one hits home for me. For years, I have lived in an environment that is, to put it generously, open about mocking other people’s taste in music when it’s hopelessly outdated or out of fashion. And I will now out myself, if only because it’s getting harder and harder to hide as time wears on. It’s time to fess up and hope that I’m embraced with sympathy rather than beaten down with derision and scorn.

Okay, we’ll do this one step at a time:

I really don’t like any popular music recorded after 1992. Yes, there are occasional exceptions to this generalization (although most of them involve songs that purposefully sound like, or have hooks reminiscent to, earlier song styles). But I feel that I can make a sweeping statement regarding my dislike of post-’92 pop and be right in roughly 97% of all circumstances.

This is probably a widely-accepted world view. Lots of people have listed similar expiration dates for their musical preferences, and a handful have even made money off the idea. So, let’s go another layer deeper.

I have an affinity for late 70s and 80s rock ballads, a feeling which is reaffirmed on an almost daily basis. Today, for example, I heard REO Speedwagon’s “Keep on Loving You” while walking into work, and it really made my morning. CDs mixed for car rides frequently feature songs like Survivor’s “The Search is Over” and Bryan Adams singing “Everything I Do, I Do it for You.” Even my wedding reception music skewed in this direction – our first dance open to the guests was to Peter Cetera’s “Glory of Love,” a song I still maintain to be one of the finest ever crafted. While you’ll find far less people that appreciate this genre of music – my wife’s high school-aged cousin complained that it was all “old people music” – my friends generally agreed that the music selection was excellent, if only for novelty’s sake.

So the broader idea of power ballads is still marginally acceptable, although my wife has started giving murderous looks to the car stereo whenever we road trip. I may have hit her saturation point, though thankfully she’s still open minded about a lot of Journey, Toto, and Chicago tracks.

So where does that leave us? You may now have an inkling as to the nature of my superficial dark secret du jour, but you don’t yet know the specifics. What insidious fact do I have to reveal? Well…

I have a deep affection for the music of Air Supply.

See how that’s pretty harmless, yet isn't something you really want to advertise? Yeah. I really enjoy listening to Air Supply. It’s uplifting, sweeping, and impossibly romantic. The music of Air Supply is a surefire cure to raise me up when I’m feeling down. It makes perfect sense to me that the cover of 1982’s Now and Forever is a picture of a skydiver drifting to the ground in front of a warm, orange sunset. I can feel that in the music -- music about love and the wonderfulness of heterosexual relationships as sung by two guys in a totally homoerotic way.

Hmm.

Without seeming like I’m backpedaling, I should clarify that I’m not an Air Supply superfan, as it were. I have at best a vague notion of the names of the band members, I’ve never seen them in concert (despite the fact that they’re still touring), and, while I probably know a lot more of their song lyrics than is recommended by regulatory boards, I don’t know them in the way that I know the catalog of, say, Billy Joel.

But I do own their Christmas album, which could be an indication of the true depth of the issue.

I got curious as to what was the impetus to my affection. I’ve felt a tie to the Supply for most of my life, so I did the most logical thing I could think of – I asked my mom about it.

“Oh, I loved Air Supply. I used to listen to them a lot. They had a lot of great stuff out around ’82, ’83… then they kind of disappeared. I had a few records, but I think I had tapes that I’d play in the car as well.”

HA! There we go -- a perfectly logical reason. I was exposed to their magic in my earliest days. But her mention of listening to them in the car jogged another memory of mine.

I had a tape I’d made from the record album of the Ghostbusters soundtrack. Growing up, I listened to it all the time because I was obsessed with the movie (which doesn’t really qualify as a superficial dark secret so much as “understandable”). The Air Supply song “I Can Wait Forever” is on that soundtrack, because it’s in the movie literally for two seconds – one of the workers evicting Venkman and company from the university is listening to it on his Walkman. So there’s another manifestation of the power of Ghostbusters, but that’s a story for another day.

So there’s the answer. I love Air Supply because there’s no reason I shouldn’t love Air Supply. It’s a matter of inevitability, like child stars growing up to be dysfunctional messes. So I can release this little secret of mine out into the open, knowing that although people may try to persecute me for my tastes and affections, I am perfectly comfortable with them. I need to know that Air Supply is there to get me through the troubled times, the times when the thoughtful, more introspective songs of Simon and Garfunkel just aren’t enough. And even the nights are better since I’ve found them.

*I do not have a third nipple. That I know of.
**I certainly don’t do this -- I don’t have the legs for it.