This 80s hit takes me straight back to Trinidad, where I’d tune in faithfully to the Billboard Top 10 on the radio, listening closely and writing down the chart positions. The radio was my only source of music. It wasn’t a limitation I questioned at the time –it was simply how music arrived.
My high school friends listened to full albums. They knew the artists deeply, track by track. I only knew the songs that rose to the surface, the ones popular enough to break through the airwaves. I didn’t have the means to buy albums. I never even stepped into a music store in Trinidad.
Still, those songs were enough. They carried the world to a small island through static and signal, teaching me what was new, what mattered, what was playing elsewhere. When I hear Electric Avenue now, I don’t just hear a hit –I hear a boy listening carefully, gathering music one song at a time, waiting for the next voice to come through the radio.