Texas Platters

While it won't go platinum like the 1993 Dazed and Confused soundtrack, which even spawned a second volume, the music from Richard Linklater's spiritual successor taps its era's aural ethos in a similar manner. Easy to imagine most tracks showing up on a vintage 1980 request hour. More specifically, the Everybody Wants Some film soundtrack opens an uncanny window into the waning days of KILT, Houston's onetime Top 40 AM powerhouse. It's worth noting the Big 610's nighttime signal extended nearly 100 miles north to Linklater's college setting in Huntsville. At that point, future classic rock warhorses still saddled up next to pop and R&B on the airwaves. The only thing missing here is Urban Cowboy fodder from the likes of Kenny Rogers and Anne Murray, which was inescapable in Texas. Opening salvo "My Sharona" has been anthologized to death, but the Knack's viral paean to brosome horndoggery remained ubiquitous in 1980 (the Chipmunks even covered it). Lesser-knowns like Jermaine Jackson's "Let's Get Serious" and Steve Forbert's "Romeo's Tune" were actually big hits in their time, and although Van Halen's titular mating call leans AOR, it could've spun between M's massive "Pop Muzik" and the Sugarhill Gang's genre-announcing "Rapper's Delight." The one left-field entry is Stiff Little Fingers' "Alternative Ulster," a Belfast-bred punk blast too strident for U.S. commercial radio, then or now. Inexplicably, Cheap Trick's Budokan version of "I Want You to Want Me" appears minus Robin Zander's spoken intro. Despite that party foul, the Everybody Wants Some compendium spins off a summery mixtape.