Nostalgia is everywhere these days. Maybe that's the reason why an old video is making the rounds on the interwebs lately.
It's a special tribute to Aurora, in pure 90s fashion.
You actually don't get much more 90s than this.
Are you as pumped up about Aurora as we are right now?
The spot started airing on Aurora's cable channel in 1993, during election night coverage. And if it pumped you up at the time...prepare to have your mind blown.
Yep, she said New Jersey.
“They are exactly alike. There’s no difference except the words," Jerome Gilmer told us.
Jerome would know. He wrote the song - for New Jersey. But it got the attention of his hometown cable station.
“He called me and said, 'Hey, we’d like to do something can we talk?'" he remembers. "It was decided that they could make Aurora fit where New Jersey fit.”
So "Positively Aurora" was born in the era when hometown pride songs were HUGE.
“You can take these to be absolute cheese, totally hokey, or you can take it as something heart warming and something to be proud of," Gilmer says.
He still writes them, usually working with a TV station.
“They’re trendy. There’s long stretches where no one would think of doing a thing like that. And I didn’t think they were going to come back. And here in the last few years we’ve done quite a few.”
Cheesy or heart warming...Gilmer hopes they accomplish the mission -- to make people feel better about who they are.
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By the way, this story reminds us of one of our favorite stories, if we may make a recommendation?
This is kind of a throw-back recommendation. It's from This American Life, from March of 2014.
Host Ira Glass, who is from Baltimore, tracks down a Canadian. A Calgarian named Ken Lima-Cuelho, to be specific, and they chat about the weird slogan song that promoted Calgary, and everything it has to offer.
One of the lyrics is "Hello Calgary." Glass says he and his friends used to listen to it because they were proud of it. They knew all of the words.
And then the Ken's dreams were crushed when Ira played him the exact same song. But it didn't say "Hello Calgary."
It said "Hello Milwaulkee."
Same song, different city.
