At some point Ardi and Kamyar had gotten their hands on a January 4, 1990 edition of the German music magazine Bravo. Although the magazine was in German, we had gone through it many times, trying to translate whatever we could. The section that interested us most was a two-page spread ranking of men and women’s artists. We were familiar with some of the individuals but most of them were unknown to us. For those that we knew amongst the men Michael Jackson and Phil Collins took third and sixth place respectively. Of the women Sandra and Madonna occupied the top two spots with Tina Turner coming in at fifth place and Nena at ninth place. As a result of this top-ten ranking we gradually became familiar with more individuals on the list such as Jason Donovan (first place) and Prince (ninth place) for the men and Kylie Minogue (third place), Paula Abdul (sixth place) and Martika (tenth place) for the women. Kamyar would later comment how he actually had come to hate Prince as he tried too hard to sound heavy metal.

The cover page pictured several artists and bands but most prominently a duo with red and blue hair. It also contained smaller pictures including Sandra, Madonna and Roxette. Ardi liked a picture of Jason Donovan, particularly his ripped jeans. There was also a group photo of New Kids on the Block which Kamyar claimed were now banned in most of the western world due to them engaging in homosexual activities.

I eventually developed enough of an interest in the magazine to want to buy it from them. I mentioned it to Ardi and Kamyar and began negotiating. We eventually settled on a cash price, mainly going to Ardi, in addition to one page of the magazine depicting Jason Donovan and Sandra that Kamyar would keep. As I found some of the information on that given page regarding other poll results useful, I suggested an alternative. Rather than that single page I let Kamyar pick two other pages, with one picturing Jason Donovan and the other Sandra.