Richard Marx, "Right Here Waiting"

Twenty years ago this week, I was on my way home from a summer "young scholars" science internship at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg. The six-week session represented my first extended period of time on my own - and I quite enjoyed the liberating feeling.

My summer soundtrack consisted of my Monkees cassettes with only a smattering of Top 40 tunes (1989 being one of pop's least vital years): Prince's "Batdance," Simply Red's "If You Don't Know Me by Now," Neneh Cherry's sublime "Buffalo Stance." But the #1 song in the nation that August was the ambitiously coiffed Richard Marx's "Right Here Waiting."

Song's a little corny, to be sure. But a young friend of mine recently told me it was one of the very first songs he remembers from his childhood, one of the first he learned on piano, and that got me thinking: How strange it now seems, in an era when what passes for ballads have refrains like "birthday sex, birthday sex" and "you tha fuckin' shit, you tha fuckin' shit," to have a #1 song that's as appropriate for kids to sing as for adults. Today, music is only so innocent when it's marketed to Radio Disney, and that's a pity for all of us.