One of the few rewards of having a dad whose job took him all over was the swag he brought home.

Most of them came from fast food restaurants that he’d stop at, and since our mother was dilligent in protecting us kids from the dodgy benefits of eating at Taco Bell or what have you, these were rare artifacts from an alternate world.

Around 1990 (my guess), my father broght home a cassette tape that had been offered as pat of a Pizza Hut promotion for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles musical tour. I loved a good half of the songs, aside from some power ballads that mae me wonder now exactly who the demographic was (perhaps a clumsy try to get teenage girls into the TMNT phenom?), which were mostly harmony-heavy buttrock and Up With People pseudo-rap moral messages about drugs and being true to yourself.

I finally found some off the album on Soulseek (as my tape was eaten long ago by a vindictive deck). While I couldn’t find the titular “Coming Out of Our Shells,” which I want to hear (mostly to see if it’s gained any weird gay subtext in the intervening 15 years).

It’s still a goof, mostly. After listening to Queensryche’s Operation: Mindcrime yesterday for the first time, I was actually charmed by the simplicity and sincerity of the Turtles’ concept album. And I gotta admit that I felt more than a little bit of pity for the musicians that were tasked with turning it in, though I guess for a musician, getting paid for a soulless piece of teensploitation with dubious artistic merits beats not getting paid at all.

Still, compare and contrast that to Paul Sabu’s work as Holy Moses in the fine film Hard Rock Zombies. First off, he was proud to put his real name on there, instead of tagging everything with the personas of fictional characters, even to the point of reissuing the songs (the soundtrack never game out) on the rerelease of his Heartbreak album (apparently, his best, but still sub-KISS). The music is remarkably similar to the TMNT, though I’m not sure that means there was any real involvement from Sabu on the project. It may be more of a commentary on buttrock in general.

I was going to include some songs from Jem and the Holograms (whose musical trivia is that the woman who voiced Jem was in popular indie band Luna until their recent breakup), but for some reason Wordpress doesn’t support mp2s, and that’s what it is (I know, I’d never even seen an mp2 before). Instead, enjoy The Carrie Nations from the movie Beyond the Valley of the Dolls doing Sweet Talkin’ Candy Man.

Holy Moses: Street Angel

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: No Treaties, Cowabunga, Walk Straight