"Smalltown Boy" / Bronski Beat

In my 1980s music burrow, I never discovered this song, never knew it existed. Way too disco-ey, way too drum-track auto play for my tastes, and so idiosyncratically British that, living by then in New York, I quite possibly never heard it at the time. (On the other hand, if Culture Club made it across the ocean....)

I can't even remember how it eventually swam into my consciousness a couple years ago. But it is now an indispensible part of my road trip playlist. This is the song I save up for the end of a long highway drive -- and when that synth intro kicks in, I can't help it, I always giggle like mad.

Just look at this video, and try to reconstruct how bold it must have felt back in 1984 (the Orwellian echoes of that date seem all too appropriate). That's lead singer Jimmy Somerville, he of the to-die-for falsetto, playing the starring role. He and his co-founder, keyboardist Steve Bronski were both Glasgow lads, back when Glasgow was all gritty and grayness, before it rediscovered its Rennie Mackintosh cool. Imagine being a gay boy growing up there. No wonder getting out of town seemed like their only option.  

 

What grabs me about most this track is, strangely enough, the very synth-laden over-produced sound that made me hate most music of the 1980s. Why does it work in this song when it repels me in so many others?

 

It's all circular hooks and refrains, repeated in a sort of minor-key trance. It's heavy on the reverb (I picture cold deserted concrete underpasses), though every once in awhile a shrill wail of despair erupts -- only to be beaten back down to the trudging mono-beat and those see-saw two-note phrases, "Run away, turn away, run away, turn away, run away." Running away is a knee-jerk reflex, a survival tool, and I'm feeling boxed in myself, claustrophobic and paranoid and -- oh, wait, is THAT what it feels like?

 

"You leave in the morning with everything you own in a little black case /  Alone on a platform, the wind and the rain on a sad and lonely face" -- it's damn haunting. It's an anthem for outcasts and misfits of all stripes, gay and otherwise. He's crossing a sort of Rubicon; who knows if he'll ever come back. My bets are he won't.

 

And yeah, the song goes on for 5 minutes, which is longer than a song should be. But somewhere in there I get hypnotized by the repetitions, by that insistent rhythm track, and lose my moorings. I'm numbed, I'm panicking, I'm fighting for air.

 

Bingo. 

H Is For...

My challenge to myself: write about 26 different artists, A to Z, in 26 days. (Well, maybe not consecutive days...)

Hall & Oates / 
"I Can't Go for That (No Can Do)"

Of course it was always Hall for me, rather than Oates -- and I know I wasn't the only music fan who harbored a crush on Daryl, judging from how the camera dwelled on his tall rangy figure and blond shag in the 1980s videos that made these guys stars. But honestly, it was his voice that did it for me, not his good looks. Really, really, I swear.

I'd been a fan since the early 1970s -- and now I had to suck it up and watch Daryl and John hit the big time with a new sound that ran perilously close to disco. Yet those scatting, soulful vocals kept Hall & Oates from being dragged under by the layers of synths and glossy production values of the times.

Let me do you a favor and post something besides the original official video, just so you won't be distracted by all the backlighting and dry-ice mists and big-shouldered suits that stamp this 1981 hit as a sign of its times.

 
Given the soft-focus R&B sweetness of H&O's earlier stuff -- songs like "When the Morning Comes," "She's Gone," and "Sara Smile" -- the 80s stuff had a lot more edge. ("Maneater." anyone?) This song, too, is not all that flattering to women, with lines like "You've got the body / Now you want the soul." But now I'm thinking that this push-pull may have been what made it interesting.

The brooding intro runs for nearly a full minute, mostly pugnacious drums, overlaid with ripples of minor-key descending keyboard riffs. Anxious tension runs through the verses, with their jerky rhythm and tinny vocal reverb: "Easy, ready, willing, overtime / Where does it stop? / Where do you dare me / To draw the line?" This is clearly a man who's getting tired of making nice.

But then it blooms into lush soulfulness for the bridge -- "I, I-I, I'll do anything / That you want me to do, / Yeah I, I-I,  I'll do most anything ' That you want me to, ooh, yeah." Hall's supple vocals caress the long legato phrases, swooping around them, stroking the vowels. We're in happy major key territory, with the background singers chiming in, scattering rose petals in his path. He's in full-on Lover Boy mode.

And then he turns on a dime. "But I can't go for that, / Nooo, / No can do / I can't go for that, / Nooo, / No can do."  That refrain's staccato words are spit out with venom; the tempo is like a wagging finger. And of course, the mind boggles: What is it she wants him to do that's so beyond the pale?

It could be anything, of course.  Going to dinner's at her folks' house; taking her shopping; having a baby; signing a pre-nup.  Yet the song's slinky, sexy underpinnings trip me up, making me picture other kinds of requests indeed. Dirty deeds. Kinky things. It's completely against my nature, but there it is.

It's a cryptic song, after all, and unsettling.  It almost doesn't hang together, the melting "I'll do anythings" pitted against those scolding "No can do's.** But something about the jam just jells.

And then, of course, the musicians themselves puncture the balloon by telling interviewers that it's not about a couple at all, but about the music business -- how they're willing to cooperate with their label, touring, doing press (appearing in back-lit videos with dry-ice smoke) -- but only up to a point. No matter how hungry they are for stardom (and I'm betting these guys were hungry as hell for it), there were certain things they wouldn't do.

Well, that clears up that mystery.  But I think I liked the song better when I thought it was about a girl.

In fact, I loved the song when I thought it was about a girl -- so I'm just going to go on hearing it that way.

BONUS: Here's a link to an episode of Daryl's House, where Cee Lo Green joins the band for an extra funky version of this song. Love how Daryl and Cee Lo keep raising the bar for each other, verse after verse.

**This song alone thrust "no can do" -- originally an obscure (and racist) phrase of pidgin Chinese -- into common usage. Who knew?

My Musical Advent Calendar

"Christmas Wrapping" /

The Waitresses

 

Here's a little time machine to the 80s...

 

Remember the Waitresses?  Or at least, remember their one hit, "I Know What Boys Like"? A sassy little post-punk number from the same MTV era that brought us the Go-Gos and the Bangles. Well, here's their other modest hit -- and it's a wonderful antidote to holiday schmaltz.

The Waitresses -- hailing from Akron, Ohio, hometown of Chrissie Hynde and Devo -- were led by Chris Butler, guitarist and songwriter, who by the way was in the crowd the day of the Kent State shootings in 1970. (This may or may not be relevant, but being from that era myself, I can't let go of that fact.)  It's intriguing, though, that they had a female lead singer, Patty Donohue, and that Butler wrote songs to reflect a female outlook.

And "Christmas Wrapping" (get the pun with "rapping"?) is about as disaffected a Christmas song as you'll hear -- no wonder it starts with "Bah humbug!"



 

Yeah, she likes Christmas in general, but she's distracted this year -- working too hard, stretched too thin (sound familiar?). Weaving through it all is her on-again, off-again flirtation with a guy who might be the one, but -- "Had his number, but never the time" -- it hasn't yet gone anywhere, really.

The shallow garage-y production, the jerky tempos, they're all so New Wave, (this song was released in 1981, after all) and Donohue's vocals nail that bored, listless affect. I love how those verses end with a sickening thud: "Christmas by myself this year," "Get this winter over with," or "But I think, I'll miss this one this year."

Yes, they trot out some of the holiday standard clichés, but only to turn them on their heads:

 

Hardly dashing through the snow

'Cause I bundled up too tight 

Last minute have to do 

A few cards a few calls. 

'Cause it's "RSVP"

No thanks, no party lights

It's Christmas eve, gonna relax

Turned down all of my invites 

 And how sad she seems, with her single girl holiday meal -- "A & P has provided me / With the world's smallest turkey."

But then -- a Christmas miracle! -- she has to run back out to the store for cranberries and --

Oh, but don't let me spoil it for you. Listen to the song already.

She Works Hard for the Money /
Donna Summer

I'm sure I won't be the only blogger trying to say something sincere about Donna Summer's death today, reportedly from lung cancer, at the relatively young age of 63. And in contrast to the enshrinement of Saint Whitney Houston after her death, I wouldn't be surprised if the pundits took this opportunity to rake up the old culture wars -- rock versus disco, soul versus disco, gays versus born-again Christians -- and to turn up hipster noses at some of her cheesier tracks, such as "Love To Love You Baby" with all its fake orgasms, her kitschy version of "MacArthur Park," or the disco anthem "Last Dance." 

Ironically, I'd already been thinking a lot about Donna Summer, wondering why so few Whitney Houston obits even mentioned her. After all, she was the reigning pop-dance diva before Whitney came along. Now, I have no vested interest in defending disco; in the late 70s, I never set foot inside a single disco. I wasn't even listening to the radio much back then.  But still.

You see, towards the end of her long run of hits -- when she herself was eager to shed the disco mantle and move on -- I too had a brief Donna Summer period. That was in the very early 80s, when a couple other junior assistant baby editors and I were taking aerobic dance classes (remember aerobic dancing?) after work in a school gym down in Greenwich Village. Week after week, the soundtrack pulsed with high-octane tracks like the Pointer Sisters "I Get Excited," Tina Turner's comeback hit "What's Love Got to Do With It?," the Weather Girls' "It's Raining Men" -- and this surprising feminist anthem: 

That video was all over MTV at the time, making Donna one of the first black artists to get significant airtime. (So see, she paved the way for Michael Jackson, too).  MTV exposure certainly gave a major push to this song and its album, She Works Hard for the Money. Apparently this record was released grudgingly, with Summer at loggerheads with her record boss David Geffen, but it revived her faltering career and put her right back up on top.   

Though I always heard it as a song about a hooker (who else works so hard for her money?), the video underlines its sympathy for women stuck in any menial/demeaning jobs. The relentless beat and the hard-edged synthesizers were totally of their time, agreed.  But at least it's about something other than sex, which was ground-breaking territory for disco music. 

And it was compulsively danceable. I'd slip this album onto my stereo turntable (yes, we're still talking vinyl era) and dance by myself in my apartment. Often once this lead-off track was over I'd lift the needle and flip the disc to play the first track on Side 2, the reggae-flavored "Unconditional Love." These songs made me feel pumped-up and powerful -- ready to don my big-shouldered power suit and go crash through some glass ceiling somewhere.

I've still got one or two of those power suits in my closet. The glass ceiling? Tt's still there too. Unshattered.  

"Head Over Heels" / Tears for Fears

In my household, we're very keen on the TV series Psych. That's where this whole thing started. On last week's episode, one of the characters proves his filthy-rich-itude by having a pet musician hanging around his mansion --whom he introduces as Curt Smith. Now, for a nanosecond I thought "Oh, the guy from the Cure" (only, duh, that's Robert Smith, I realize now). It all got cleared up in a jiff, anyway, as soon as he started strumming his guitar and singing "Everybody Wants To Rule the World."

As rough as his performance was -- and that was part of the joke -- just hearing that jaunty bit of Eighties Cheese really sent me back in time. I won't pretend that I was a big Tears for Fears fan -- if I had been, maybe I'd have recognized the singer's name -- but you really couldn't escape them for a while there. And I think we did own one of their albums, the one with the black-and-white close-up photo of the two guys in the band. (What was with that in the Eighties -- just two guys was all you needed to have a band?)

Soon as I started listening to it, however, I completely forgot "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" and got hooked instead on this one. Which as it happens was sung by the other guy in the band, Roland Orzabal -- go figure. Really, who kept them straight? Even after Curt left, and the band was just Roland (apparently in the Eighties you could even have a band with just one guy), I had no idea who was who.

But you gotta admit, it's a catchy little tune, even with all those glitzy Eighties production values. Mmmmm, I can see the fake fog rolling onto the stage now...



The lyrics are inconsequential, really; it's all about that electric piano riff, and those falsetto harmonies in the chorus. The main point of the song seems to be the guy's general inability to communicate with his girlfriend, so the fact that you can't really understand the mumbled-yet-sincere words seems quite natural. There is one line that always put me off -- "You keep your distance with a system of touch" -- I get the vowel play, the chiming of "sys" and "dis," but what in the hell does that mean? It's almost as if it was written by somebody for whom English was a second language.

But those yearning emotions, they come across perfectly well without lyrics. There's no story to tell, no situation to resolve -- it's just inchoate longing, and surprisingly powerful. Waves of knee-jerk nostalgia wash over me when I listen to this song. It's curious indeed.

I can't resist also letting you see this video, which has new words dubbed in over the original video. Hysterical!

"Don't Dream It's Over" / Crowded House

Over the weekend, I had the pleasure of watching Hot Tub Time Machine -- a riotous goof of a movie in which three old friends climb into a hot tub that mysteriously transports them back to the Eighties. ("Why the Eighties?" moans one character. "The Eighties were my worst decade ever!") Relax, pal -- they were everybody's worst decade. That's the running gag of this film, and it never fails -- the garish fashions, the shallow fads, and most of all the cheesy music.

I knew at least one of the songs from my Eighties Cheese Week would make it into the movie, and indeed there it was: Bryan Ferry's "More Than This," accompanying a scene in which a stoned and self-pitying John Cusack parses the state of his broken heart. As for the rest of the film -- well, even with that magic John Cusack connection, it wouldn't make it onto my list of the best compiled movie soundtracks, but only because the filmmakers went for the most irritating songs possible. That was the whole point.

So maybe it's a good thing that "Don't Dream It's Over" isn't in the movie. God knows it has been in enough other TV shows and commercials over the years, not to mention how many times it's been covered by other artists. It has achieved a weird sort of out-of-time quality all its own.

I suppose I must have heard this song -- Crowded House's breakthrough hit -- in 1986, when it hit #2 on the US charts. And now that I look at the video, I realize I must have seen it a hundred times on MTV (remember MTV?). It's a sweet video, too, with Neil Finn strolling through a series of rooms representing the eras of his life. At the time, I just thought that it was set in a house because the band was named Crowded House. I had no idea that these guys were from New Zealand and Australia (unlike Men At Work, who couldn't let you forget they were Aussies) or that this band was sorta the second chapter of the Finn brother's previous band, Split Enz. (Split who?) Given the prog rock tendencies of Split Enz, maybe it's better that I didn't know that.



To be honest, I always thought this song's title was "Hey Now," since that's what Neil Finn sings most clearly, over and over, in the refrain. When I heard it today in the dentist's office, it came on after Outkast's "Hey Ya" -- I'm betting that DJ made the same association. What a pity that the crammed lyrics of this song aren't always perfectly clear, because they're much more interesting than your usual Eighties love song.

For example, the opening line -- "There is freedom within, / There is freedom without" -- is the sort of Heavy Statement that John Lennon had taught up to expect in our rock songs, but the next line is much more intriguing: "Try to catch the deluge in a paper cup." (Okay, that just nails the Lennon "Imagine" reference.) Again, in the third verse this tune's Road Song credentials are proclaimed: "Now I'm towing my car, / There's a hole in the roof" -- an image which, I'm sorry, makes me laugh. But you don't know whether you're laughing with him or at him until you get the mumbled next line, "My possessions are causing me suspicion but there's no proof." And in the last verse, that self-effacing irony makes all the difference, as he announces, "Now I'm walking again / To the beat of a drum / And I'm counting the steps to the door of your heart." Despite the heroic ring of the verse-opening melodic phrase, he's not setting himself up as a sage and a poet. He's just a guy, a traveling man, who has to be away from his baby for a while and doesn't want her to despair.

Sure, the production values of this track are totally Eighties -- less a wall of sound than a wall-to-wall carpet of sound, with those baffled voices and an instrumental track so plush, it's more environment than backing. Apart from the metallic clang of the guitars (another Eighties trait) and the churchy organ in the instrumental break, you can barely decipher the separate instruments at all. And that falsetto jump on "Dree-ee-eam it's over" -- okay, there is a certain spangled Lycra quality there.

But the harsh disco rhythms of the Eighties have no place here, only a fluid current of rhythm that bears us smoothly along. I love the fluttery meter of the verses, and how the tune seems to curl in protectively, as if the singer is cradling his girlfriend in his arms before hitting the road. And though the melody swells so dramatically in the chorus, there's just enough syncopation to keep it dancing instead of bombastic.

It's the sort of song that makes your heart leap, before you've figured out what it is. That's probably why so many soundtracks use it -- it telegraphs love, and tenderness, and melancholy. But I also get a certain existential poise here -- something that the frenetic Eighties rarely aspired to, let alone achieved. Mega-hit status may have prevented me from giving this song, and this band, fair dues back in the Eighties. But it's never to late to go back.

EIGHTIES CHEESE WEEK

"Wake Me Up Before You Go Go" / Wham!

Here's the trouble -- after a week immersed in 80s cheese, it doesn't sound so cheesey to me any more. I'm thinking -- is it fair to make fun of Yes just because, in the last stutter of their prog-rock decline, they released an overproduced dance-rock hit like "Owner of a Lonely Heart"? Did Christopher Cross ever pretend to be anything more than the mellow soft-rock crooner of "Sailing"? Am I going to mock the glossy synth-pop of Berlin's "Take My Breath Away," just because I associate it too closely with Tom Cruise in Top Gun? Can I deny that I still enjoy the perky pleasure of Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Want To Have Fu-un"?

And then it hit me -- Wham! There is no song that better sums up the slick plastic club beat of the 1980s than "Wake Me Up Before You Go." No, wait, excuse me, it's "Wake Me Up Before You Go Go" -- that second syllable is essential to this deliriously frivolous track. Of course it's "go go" so that they can rhyme it in the chorus with "yo-yo" ("don't leave me hanging on like a yo-yo") and "solo" ("'Cause I'm not planning on going solo"). Clever, hunh?

Remember in the movie Zoolander, where Derek Zoolander and his male model buddies go out for a double orange mocha frappuchino to lift their spirits? It's this infectious track on the car radio that inspires the guys to goof around the gas station, playfully spraying each other with gasoline. For just one moment -- before a tossed match incinerates them -- we can bask in their carefree frolic. The minute you hear that song, it signals that the characters are shallow mindless hedonists addicted to glitz.

This single hit the clubs in 1984, almost a parody of itself from the very beginning. Wham! didn't last long -- they broke up in 1985 -- just long enough to spawn the career of George Michael, who was one half of the duo (his partner was Andrew Ridgeley). I couldn't tell you a single other song by George Michael; as far as I'm concerned, he only exists to provide Craig Ferguson with punchlines for his late-night talk show monologue. But I gather he's made a fortune as a Pop Star of the First Magnitude, at least over in the UK. The plot line of this song is absurdly simple: He complains that his girlfriend's been cheating on him -- not by sleeping with another man, but by going out dancing (hence the "go-go"). Tonight, he cajoles, he wants her to dance with him -- in bed. Hey, you expected profundity?

The joyous spirit of doo-wop dances through this song, with its upward swooping vocals, handclap percussion, and irresistibly syncopated beat. Although there are enough drums and keyboards to bring it squarely into the disco camp, the flat, foregrounded sound reminds me more than anything else of the sound of a 1960s transistor radio tuned to an AM station. The sound isn't retro, exactly, but the spirit is.

And I have to say, there's some nifty word play in some of these verses -- like the opener: "You put the boom boom into my heart, / You send my soul sky high when your lovin' starts. /Jitterbug into my brain, /Goes bang bang bang till my feet do the same." Or the later verse, that proclaims, "You get the gray skies outta my way, / You make the sun shine brighter than Doris Day. / Turn a bright spark into a flame, / My beats per minute never been the same."

I'm posting a video because you really have to watch these guys sell this song; that's the whole point. The perfectly coiffed hair, the groovy dance moves, the tight white pants and blinding white teeth -- it was a whole package. Totally 80s.

EIGHTIES CHEESE WEEK

"More Than This" / Roxy Music

To a non-fan like me, it was glaringly obvious that Roxy Music was all about the ego of Bryan Ferry. Other talents might pass in and out (Brian Eno during their glam-art-prog phase, Paul Carrack in the disco-soul reincarnation) but it was always Ferry that mattered, he of the broad shoulders, strong jaw, and winsome black forelock. Only a guy who looked like a suave 1930s film version of Heathcliff could make it look sexy to sing with such a high falsetto.




I never listened to Roxy Music before this song exploded in America in 1982-83, so I'll eternally think of Ferry in that leather jacket and bow-tie, gyrating so earnestly on the More Than This video. (Awful dancing, BTW -- even David Byrne managed to dance better than this, once he'd found he had a pelvis.) It immediately struck me as the fakiest piece of crap I'd ever heard. I hate overproduced music, and this was over-the-top lush, full of shimmering synths and splashy drums and pling-y electric guitars. Ferry sings for about the first two minutes and the rest just zones out into mesmerized instrumentals.

Ferry has said this was about a doomed love affair; the video, with its luminous cross hanging behind Ferry, implies that it's about God, or Jesus. For all I know it's about a woman who left him to enter a nunnery, which would definitely be an option for me. Those vague arty lyrics don't help, either. He offers us no particulars, just knee-jerk poetic images like dead leaves and wind and sea tide, interspersed with ruminations about knowing and learning. All very deeply felt, of course, brooding and melancholy. The chorus hints at some deeper meaning: "More than this /There is nothing / More than this / Tell me one thing / More than this / There is nothing." But more than what, Bryan? Please tell us.

Well, what it's really about is the verse's odd melodic intervals, which give Ferry opportunity to jump back and forth between that beguiling high register and his manful lower voice. Every time he switches to the falsetto, it's like he's saying "Look at me, I'm a sensitive guy!" Then he switches low again -- "But I still have testosterone, ladies!" Then he coyly ducks his head, flashes his blindingly white teeth, gives us his best profile, and shakes the raven forelock down in front of his bedroom eyes.

Years later, when I finally discovered Style Council, I realized what Roxy Music was trying to do, bringing soul into the disco era; the difference is that Paul Weller was writing the songs for Style Council, and they had backbone. For all its aural lushness, that pillow of synthesized sound, "More Than This" is just stupid. The only people I know who really liked it also happened to have the hots for Bryan Ferry (a substantial population, I must say). Until Robert Palmer came along with "Addicted to Love" and proved that a handsome guy in a suit could still sing with irony and wit....

EIGHTIES CHEESE WEEK

"I Melt With You" / Modern English

The mushy soft rock hits that began this decade were really a holdover from the 1970s, like a nasty cold that just wouldn't go away. But as it oozed along, the 1980s became a musical Petri dish in which bad musical ideas bred like viruses, spawning a new race of slick, faux-sincere pop trash. I'm afraid I know this music far better than I ought to, thanks to a 2-CD package called Eighties Wave! put out by Entertainment magazine. My kids were hooked on this for several months when they were toddlers -- and why not? Culture Club, Tears for Fears, the Thompson Twins, Wang Chung, A Flock of Seagulls, Haircut One Hundred, the Vapors -- all produced glossy, gimmicky tunes with cartoonlike voices and an unmistakeable beat.



Prime among them was Modern English's one big hit, from their 1982 album After the Snow. Not that I bought the album -- it was never a good bet to buy the album for any of these 80s pop bands, since quality usually fell off drastically after the one hit track. (Although I did buy Culture Club's Kissing To Be Clever and enjoyed it hugely, for reasons I can no longer fathom.) But for a while, when "I Melt With You" was saturating the airwaves (it hit the States in 1983, and oddly enough, again in 1989), I was convinced it was a good song.

Instead of overproduction, "I Melt With You" offered a refreshingly amateur mix of jangly surf guitars, autopilot drumbeats, and crudely reverbed vocals, with all the mumbly glottal diction of punk rockers (Modern English, who hailed from Colchester, England, started out as a punk band named -- get this -- The Lepers). Even when synths get layered into the mix, it's only a splash of color, a sort of knee-jerk contrapuntal riff. And defying the conventions of ponderous anthemic build-up, this song deliberately strips out the instruments a couple of times, so the singers can hollowly intone, as if hypnotized, "The future's / open /wide!" Whatever that meant.

So here's the big question: why isn't this song sexy? It should be, if you look at the lyrics of the chorus: "I'll stop the world and melt with you /You've seen the difference and /It's getting better all the time / There's nothing you and I won't do [okay, that line's a little kinky] / I'll stop the world and melt with you." That one word, that verb "melt," should be so delicious. I did read somewhere that the song is supposedly set at the moment of nuclear apocalypse, with the two lovers clasping each other, their bodies fusing. It's an intriguing idea, but ultimately I don't buy it. That storyline would at least be romantic; there's no romance here.

No, the haggard vocals, that inexorable ticking beat, the hard metallic surface of the instrumentation, make this song anything but soft and melting. Aggression and paranoia run through the first verse: "Moving forward using all my breath / Making love to you was never second best / I saw the world thrashing all around your face / Never really knowing it was always mesh and lace." Even if you knew that Modern English's previous album was titled Mesh and Lace (I didn't), the S&M subtext is hard to miss. And yeah, the second verse pays lip service to noble ideals, throwing out lame catch phrases like "dream of better lives" and "imaginary grace" and "a pilgrimage to save this human race," but it's way too vague to convince anybody.

In this song -- and in so many other New Wave songs -- love isn't an emotion, it's a conditioned reflex. No orgasm, just spasm. I listen to it now and wonder, "What was I thinking?" But of course I wasn't thinking. Hello? It was the Eighties.

EIGHTIES CHEESE WEEK

"Total Eclipse of the Heart" / Bonnie Tyler

If we have the Bee Gees to blame for Air Supply, then I think Stevie Nicks should have to take credit for the new breed of rock chicks that started yelping all over the airwaves in the 1980s. I didn't mind the New Wave girls, like Debbie Harry of Blondie, Annie Lennox of the Eurythmics, or Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders -- at least they had saucy wit and girl-power toughness. (Hooking up with Ray Davies, though, Chrissie -- I'll never forgive you for that.) No, the ones I really couldn't stand were the Top-40 belters -- Pat Benatar, Laura Branigan, Irene Cara, and Welsh rocker Bonnie Tyler. Long before the term "diva" was co-opted to mean any female singer with a big voice, these babes were tearing out their vocal cords on every speaker within earshot.

Maybe it's no coincidence that at the dawn of the 1980s, just as working girls in power suits were striving to shatter corporate glass ceilings, the women of rock set out to kick the asses of their wimpy soft rock male counterparts. All these babes cultivated the hard edges of their voices -- no soft-focus girly sopranos here. Bonnie Tyler's first hit, "It's a Heartache," paid tribute to Rod Stewart, and her voice, like his, is equal parts grit and sob, perfectly calculated to sing about desperation and desire. In fact (fun facts to know and tell), Tyler's distinctive voice developed after an operation for nodules on her vocal cords; apparently she violated doctor's orders and started singing too song after the operation. At first she thought that huskiness was the end of her singing career. She was wrong.

What really made Tyler's 1983 album Faster Than the Speed of Night a megahit, though, was the no-holds-barred arrangements of her producer, Jim Steinman, the guy who made Meat Loaf a star. The album version of this song clocked in at 6:58 -- nearly seven minutes -- though it was truncated to four-and-a-half minutes to get radio play. Of course I'm giving you the unedited version here, for total schlock effect, as well as the cheesiest dissolve effects available on my moviemaker program. Might as well go whole hog.



Building a song to a bombastic climax was de rigueur in the 1980s. Steinman, however, was crafty enough to know that a song couldn't sustain that level of intensity for seven minutes; the song keeps retreating to wistful interludes where it's just Bonnie and her piano (well, really Roy Bittan's piano), before rolling back in with the Rick Derringer guitar licks, a tsunami of synths, a thunderstorm of percussion (hi there, Max Weinberg!). How to funny to find all these Springsteen sidemen here, since IMO Bruce himself is still addicted to those 1980s overblown endings.

How could this song fail to be a hit? It's got not one but three addictive hooks. The first is the call-and-response duet with Rory Dodd, as she babbles about her emotions ("Every now and then I get a little bit helpless till I'm lying like a child in your arms") while his distant voice nobly exhorts her, "Turn around, bright eyes!" Ah, there are those strong, understanding arms she can collapse into. I read somewhere that Steinman was inspired by the Heathcliff-Cathy romance in Wuthering Heights. Oh, yeah, Emily Bronte was totally thinking of this song when she wrote that book.

Next Bonnie launches into a Meat Loaf-style voice rip, declaiming "And I need you now tonight / And I need you more than ever /And if you only hold me tight / We'll be holding on forever." Yes, "hold me tight" -- wink wink -- that's always been pop-speak for "screw my brains out." Then (the Steinman touch) things suddenly hush up as she ruefully sings, "Once upon I was falling in love / Now I'm only falling apart / There 's nothing I can do / A total eclipse of the heart." Wipe a tear away and start it all over again -- you've got four more minutes to fill up.

The lyrics paint her as a needy, pathetic mess, but those bulldozer vocals send the opposite message. If I were a guy, I'd be terrified of this chick. This song may have single-handedly set feminism back 20 years. And Bonnie Tyler followed it up with the even more desperate "Holding Out For A Hero," featured in the film Footloose, which served as an anthem for an entire generation of love-starved single gals in the Looking for Mr. Goodbar era. Oh, man, am I glad the 80s are over.

EIGHTIES CHEESE WEEK

"I'm All Out of Love" / Air Supply

Frankly, I don't know if I can cover this all in just one week...but I've been beseiged lately by screeching echoes of the 1980s, quite possibly the worst decade in the history of pop music. I'm not just talking disco (hey, I liked the Pointer Sisters and Donna Summer), the goofy excesses of New Wave and power pop, or even heavy metal (which, as you may well guess, I am constitutionally incapable of listening to). No, the stuff that's been haunting me is the truly awful Top-40 radio hits of the era, with MTV serving as an accessory to the crime. . . .

Surely no band in the 1980s did more to lower the quality of mainstream pop than Air Supply. The term "soft rock" had to be invented to explain what this duo -- English singer/guitarist Graham Russell and Australian singer Russell Hitchcock -- were doing to the noble art of the pop song. Well, okay, the Bee Gees had already pointed that bus downhill (remember "How Deep Is Your Love"?) but Air Supply took off the parking brake and stomped on the accelerator.




This hit single came out in 1980, starting the decade with an anguished whimper. It came from their megahit LP Lost in Love, which also gave the world the unforgettable (and oh how I've tried to forget it) "Every Woman in the World." Two years later they would assault the airwaves again with "Even the Nights Are Better," and would top even these abominations in 1985 with the excruciating "Power of Love (You Are My Lady)."

The Air Supply formula was simple: Take two saccharine tenor voices; have them wail in close harmony about passionate love, using only superlatives and ultimatums; load up the tracks with bombastic strings and whaling percussion; and whip it all up in a sea of doubled vocals and reverb. Got a chorus? Repeat it at least four times, building the volume and the frenzy each time.

Unlike most of their big hits, "All Out Of Love" is a break-up song, which just meant that the singers could wail a little more miserably. The story, however, is pretty vague -- at first it just seems like he's away on a trip ("I'm lying alone with my head on the phone [OUCH!] / Thinking of you till it hurts"), but in the chorus, it seems that they've totally split up: "I'm all out of love, I'm so lost without you / I know you were right, believing for so long / I'm all out of love, what am I without you / I can't be too late to say that I was so wrong." Hmmm. So she was the one who held it together, he was a schmuck, and now he's trying to get her back.

In the second verse, however, he's pleading with her to come carry him home (from where? why can't he carry his own self home?). So perhaps they're just on a self-imposed "break." (Why does that term always make me think of Ross and Rachel from Friends?). "What would you say if I called on you now," he wheedles, "and said that I can't hold on?" The self pity is almost unbearable. And then there's that odd bridge, where he whimpers over and over, "What are you thinking of?" I just don't get what that has to do with anything.

Well, it wouldn't be the first pop song with a muddled story line. But that seems like an awful cheat, given the overblown emotion of that pompous production. After all, it was the 80s, the era of big hair, wide lapels, shoulder pads, and platform shoes; no wonder pop music also became a grandiose cartoon of itself. The sad thing is, I feel as if this era sucked love dry of all genuine romance, leaving pop music with only two modes: crude sex (hip hop) and neurosis (indie pop). What a shame.