Zrbo's Favorite Songs of 2019

Wow, 2019! What a year, huh? All that STUFF that happened. It was nuts! Right? And let's not forget all those people that died. But, then, there were all those people that lived too! Crazy!

I don't have much to say about the state of music anymore. By now I've mainly retreated into my own world of music (sitting in a bunker), with only the occasional bit of popular music piercing through (here behind my wall). I couldn't even tell you what's in the Top 40 anymore, maybe a Kanye song, or maybe Drake? I heard there's someone named Lizzo? I dunno. With that caveat, here are some songs that managed to break through.

5 - Lebanon Hanover - "Babes of the 80s" (She Past Away Remix)


I have to give credit where credit is due. Youtube's algorithm is remarkably good at zeroing in on a specific music preference and offering more of it up for your listening pleasure. Here we have a song brought forth by our algorithmical gods, bestowed onto me, and I now bestow it on to you.

I've never heard of the band Lebanon Hanover, but these guys goth, and they goth hard. Yes, I just turned goth into a verb. This song is steeped in late-night murky spooky club dance. But look, what w'ere really here for is the VIDEO. And what a marvelous video it is.

This video is an amazing capsule of 80's dance culture. Look at these people! When modern entertainment tries to recreate the 80s (Stranger Things et. al.) it could never dream of achieving what we see here. Just look at the lanky, sweaty guy at 1:06, or the 80's version of Jersey Shore in his jacket at 1:25 and 3:27. There's also this amazingly average looking couple at 4:20 who dance perfectly in time with the actual song.

Then at 2:15 we have one of the most amazing specimens you could possibly hope to find. This guy saw the video for A Flock of Seagulls' "I Ran" and ran straight toward some marvelous hair. Holy New Wave Batman!

Ok, so I can tell that some of this video looks a little more recent. The mohawked woman who starts off the video and a few people shortly thereafter look like they were probably filmed in the past decade. Also, the more I watch the video the more I know I've seen some of this old footage before, I just can't remember where from. So this is probably not some long lost footage that the Swiss duo Lebanon Hanover have been sitting for 30 years. But wow. A nice, moody dark wave club song and a fantastic little video to go with it.

4 - Childish Gambino - "Redbone"


Alright, I realize I'm a couple years late to this song, but by god is this thing funky. I'll confess this only here on this very blog, but whenever this song starts up within about three seconds my urge to engage in some substances legal in my state begins to skyrocket. It practically demands it. Mr. Gambino (or should we say, everyone's second favorite Hans Solo) sure has an ear for the funkiest of grooves.

3 - Charli XCX & Christine and the Queen - "Gone"


You may recall that I had a Charli XCX song on last year's top 5. I put Charli on the list again this year because I find her pop experimentation intriguing. She's pushes at the boundaries of what pop can be. For example, on this year's album Charli which includes last year's pick "1999", she has a follow up called "2099" - and it sounds just like that. Like some sort of bizarre pop music from the future. I honestly think it sounds horrible. But you know what? I'm glad someone's at least trying to create something different in the pop music space.

With the video for "Gone" we have Charli and genderqueer artist Christine and Queens having some sort of sexual power fantasy strapped to cars in the rain thing going on, and damn do they bring the energy. Especially Christine, she just throws her whole self into the endeavor. It's quite impressive.

2 - Chvrches - "Never Say Die"


I said at the beginning of this post how I've largely retreated into music and artists I'm already familiar with. Why, just last year I had a Charli XCX song on this list, and I've mentioned Chvrches in my yearly top ten's at least twice before. This track is actually off of 2018's album Love Is Dead that I didn't get around listening to until this year. With Love is Dead the band decided to go with an outside producer for the first time, enlisting guidance by bringing in Eurythmic's Dave Stewart. It's a much glossier, almost pop-like album. It's a good album, but it feels to me like a lot of the weirder, stranger edges of Chvrches have been slowly sanded off with each subsequent album. Many songs sound a little too pop friendly. I miss the stranger tracks like their debut album's "Science/Visions", or "Lungs".

That being said, there are some good songs to be found on Love Is Dead and "Never Say Die" is one of them. I don't really have much to say about the track - I like the sparkly synths and the way it fades off at the end, lending the impression that it goes on forever.

1 - Mila Mar - "A Song For Me"


With all the shit going on in the world, and with the multitude of stress in my own life (did I mention I had twin boys this year?) I needed something calm. Mila Mar's "A Song For Me" was my calming anchor. Mila Mar is this little German group I stumbled upon many years ago that musically is difficult to describe. They kinda alternate between world music, opera, and light pop music. It's a Mazzy Star situation as well - the name of the band is Mila Mar, but the amazing voice behind it is Anke Hachfeld, who I've read has a ridiculous four octave range (she performs solo under the name Milù).

You can hear Anke's versatility on this track, and if you're interested in hearing more you couldn't do any better than listen to their track "Was Bleibt" (What Remains), that would make Richard Wagner weep with envy (someone give her a viking helmet already, for God's sake!).

"A Song For Me" begins calmly and slowly, with notes that almost sound like a lullaby or children's song. Sung in a made up language, a la Sigur Ros, the song has no real lyrics, just impassioned morphemes that express great emotion. The song slowly gathers steam, with drums coming in near the end to help lift it to a triumphant finish. It's the perfect song to wake up to in the morning (which I did many times) and it's my favorite song of 2019.

"Love Shack": Don't Call It A Comeback AKA "Roam" (Up The Charts) If You Want To

Take that Patagonia vest-wearing attorney, that cat meme-obsessed housewife, that Bible-thumping Mormon schoolteacher, that Tesla-driving tech bro, gather them together at a wedding reception, play "Love Shack" and "Roam" on the stereo system, and what will they be doing? They will be dancing. Sure as the lord made little green apples, they will be dancing.

Herein lies the beauty of '80s music. No matter how weird your band, no matter how how "deviant" the majority of the record-buying public might have deemed your lifestyle, no matter how unlikely it would have been that you and your listeners would have ever frequented the same zip code, with the right song, you could still crash into the mainstream and find yourself permanently lodged there for all eternity. Witness Devo and "Whip It." Witness the Clash and "Rock the Casbah." And with all due respect to "Rock Lobster," in 1989, The B-52's did this not once, but twice. Little did the straitlaced public know, however, that the ride to the top hadn't been all fish and candy.

To those paying attention in the early '80s, the B-52's probably came off like a non-stop party (in bounds or out of bounds). It would have taken a serious dose of bad vibes to kill that buzz. Well, if anything could do it, a band member dying of AIDS might have been just the thing. From Wikipedia:

During the recording [of their follow-up to Whammy!], guitarist Wilson had been suffering from AIDS, though none of the other band members were aware of his illness except for Strickland, as he "did not want anyone to worry about him or fuss about him." Wilson died from his illness on October 12, 1985, at the age of 32 ... Cindy Wilson was devastated by her brother's death, and her bandmates were depressed about Ricky's passing. The band went into seclusion and did not tour to promote their album. This was the beginning of an extended hiatus from their musical careers.

Many bands break up for trifling reasons. The guitarist stole the drummer's toothbrush. Their last single only peaked at #7 instead of #6. You know, little stuff. A member dying of AIDS ... is not that kind of reason. Talk about a party out of bounds. If the B-52's had honestly called it quits at that point, who could have blamed them?

But cue the saccharine made-for-TV movie music, because in arguably the most feel-good twist in all of '80s pop, not only did the B-52's re-group after the passing of Ricky Wilson, they essentially tripled their popularity. "Love Shack" and "Roam" were certainly the first B-52's songs I ever heard, although, to be fair, I didn't frequent gay clubs very often when I was nine years old.

"Love Shack" and "Roam" are so much more ... how can I put this? ... melodically graceful than the usual B-52's fare. It's a little suspicious. Even their best tracks tended to sound like free association jam sessions that barely skirted novelty status. "Love Shack" and "Roam" are like ... actual songs. At times I've wondered if they weren't even written by the band themselves, but it turns out the only outside contributor was Robert Waldrop, lyricist of "Roam." The traces of post-punk from their debut album apparently weren't allowed into this particular love shack. What I find so uplifting about these two post-Ricky hits is that they aren't mournful or defeatist in the least. The B-52's literally partied their grief away, and the public must have found the unexpected positivity infectious - assuming they were even aware that one of the non-singing members had died anyway (I mean, there's the two girls in wigs, the awkward MC guy, and ... some other people?). Like the Pretenders before them, the B-52's turned New Wave tragedy to New Wave triumph. I'm tempted to recommend this approach to other bands, but if biblically bleak misfortune was truly the fuel that down-and-out recording artists needed in order to return to commercial relevance, then DeBarge would have had as many comebacks as Cher by now.

Fred Schneider was lucky, I say - damn lucky. Because the two other singers in his band possessed such rich, powerful, distinctive, sensual voices, it allowed him to get away with murder. Funny, but back in the day I never thought there was anything remotely weird about Schneider's off-kilter delivery (which Wikipedia defines with a German word too magnificent to be real: "sprechgesang"). Sure, their male singer sounded like Jerry Lewis on Benzedrine, but come on, that David Bowie guy sounded pretty weird too, and no one seemed to comment on that. He knows just when to drop in and just when to cut out, hardly ever stepping over Kate and Cindy's parts (Flava Flav, take note). He's like the spice, not the key ingredient.



Look: you know "Love Shack," I know "Love Shack" ... what can I say about "Love Shack" other than that it grooves harder and more effortlessly than most of the '60s dance singles it's imitating (mainly the Temptations' "Psychedelic Shack") and feels about as dated to me as an Ansel Adams photo of Half Dome. Highlights:

• 0:01 - Opening drum fill possibly lifted from the Four Tops' "It's the Same Old Song," followed by handclaps possibly lifted from the Angels' "My Boyfriend's Back" (all perfectly allowed, of course)
• 0:29 - Mmm, those harmonies on "Lookin' for the love ... getaway"  - eat your heart out, Bee Gees
• 0:59 - The little keyboard glissando that punctuates the double-timed drums after "get too-geh-thuh!"
• 1:47 - Cindy stretching "highway" into a four-syllable word, resembling something like "highway-uhh-eee!"
• 3:44 - The horns taking several seconds to haphazardly slide downward at the start of the "call and response" section, as if someone had just unplugged their power cable
• 3:58 - The surprisingly lusty "call and response" section, which sports a good deal more of a "battle of the sexes" feel than the corresponding section from the Isley Brothers' "Shout" that most likely inspired it
• 4:48 - Fred hollering "Your what?" and Cindy following with three of the most misinterpreted words in all of '80s pop. "Hen room ... busted"? "Can rule ... resting"? When informed one day that the words she utters are "tin roof ... rusted," I thought to myself, "How does that make any more sense than all the other mondegreens people have come up with over the years?"
• 4:53 - The "crowd" inside this supposed "Love Shack" (I assume made up of the B-52's and sundry companions horsing around in the studio), having continuously kept its presence relegated to the background (a la Johnny Rivers' "Live at the Whiskey-a-Go-Go" hits like "Memphis" and "Seventh Son") suddenly letting out a prominent yelp or two in reaction to the news of Cindy's tin roof allegedly rusting

Watching the "Love Shack" video is always a frustrating experience for me because I'm so used to listening to the 5:34 album version, and the video features the 4:18 single version, which chops up the call-and-response section so thoroughly that, I mean, they might as well have cut out the whole thing, but otherwise I find it a hoot from start to finish, looking like the Russ Meyer/John Waters collaboration that the world was just not deserving enough to receive. The roof of the Love Shack - excuse me, "Shaque D'Amour" - is a giant chess board! They pour soap suds into your martini! Even the goats are having a great time! Does this look like the sight of a band whose guitarist just passed? Well, that's probably how Ricky would have wanted it.



As for "Roam": while it's not quite as quotable and not quite as kitschy as "Love Shack," I'd say it's just as infectious in its own swirling, kaleidoscopic way, not to mention just as popular (both songs peaked at #3 in the US). It has something that very few B-52's songs have: wistfulness. I think Fred wisely knew to sit this one out. Question: have handclaps ever made a chorus worse? If anyone out there can find an example of this, please mail your response to Little Earl c/o Cosmic American Blog, 113 7th Ave., New York, NY 10026. A colleague at work recently asked me to name my top five favorite songs produced by Nile Rodgers, offering "Roam" as a possibility. I nodded and said, "Oh yeah, that's probably one," as if I was well aware that Nile Rodgers had produced "Roam." But I wasn't! Nevertheless, I kept my cool under pressure. Hemingway would have been proud. Funny but the production doesn't sound markedly different from the production on "Love Shack," which was produced by Don Was. I mentioned that I got a Pee-Wee's Playhouse vibe from the "Stand" video, but I definitely get a Pee-Wee's Playhouse vibe from the "Roam" video, which features the band members literally "roaming the world" via blue screen (I wonder if they've found Lisa Stansfield's baby) and what appears to be hand-drawn, stop-motion graphics. Check out Fred's face as a banana flies through a donut hole at 1:26. The studio they filmed it in was probably so cheap, I wouldn't be surprised if the tin roof had rusted.

I Guess R.E.M. Couldn't "Stand" To Take Every Song Of Theirs Too Seriously?

Oh yeahhhhh. These guys.

See, if you want to knock the pop music of 1989, you have to remember that there were also real, thoughtful, ambitious, oddball, flesh-and-blood bands like R.E.M. floating around at the time as well, right out there in broad daylight, for crying out loud. At this point, a band like R.E.M. weren't just having "alternative" hits; they were having "actual" hits. Once the sole province of comic book-collecting Art History majors, R.E.M. were now appealing even to the jocks and cheerleaders who were probably pointing and laughing at long-time R.E.M. fans on their way to the latest pep rally.

I'm glad that "Stand" (which peaked at #6 on the Billboard Hot 100) wasn't R.E.M.'s first top ten hit. Instead, I think it was a perfect "second" hit. Dear God, can you imagine? If "Stand" had been R.E.M.'s first hit, it could have easily sucked them into years of undeserved ridicule from low-information record buyers, like, say, what happened to the Flaming Lips with "She Don't Use Jelly." But because "The One I Love" sounded so firmly like the work of a serious, brooding, fiery, artistically credible rock band, I feel like "Stand" was able to take their whole Southern gothic persona in a lighter direction without derailing that persona entirely. Also: smart move to follow up their goofiest-ever single with a gnarly, riff-heavy, hard-rocking ode to the U.S. government's deadly use of Agent Orange - just in case anyone was about to accuse them of having gone "soft" or "selling out."

Granted, I wasn't around during the Chronic Town days and I can't bitch about having listened to R.E.M. back when they were still "good" in 1982 (*eye roll*), but I feel like R.E.M.'s late '80s move toward greater commercial success came about in a very organic, respectable way, with the band genuinely evolving in a more radio-friendly direction and the radio genuinely evolving in a more "left of the dial" direction simultaneously. I doubt that, during the making of Document and Green, the boys were really sitting around thinking, "All right, we need to write some hits!" - unlike, say, my impression of the Ramones when they recorded End of the Century (and the Ramones would have killed for a hit the size of "Stand"). I was quite surprised to have learned many years ago that R.E.M. had always been somewhat commercially successful even from the get-go, with Murmur charting in the Top 40 and "Radio Free Europe" actually being judged on American Bandstand. Don't believe me? Behold the most mesmerizing, most surreal, most uncategorizeable YouTube clip you will ever lay your eyes on:



What is this? What is going on here? This may be the greatest two minutes of '80s television I have ever seen. If you switched out "Radio Free Europe" with Kool & the Gang's "Celebration" on the audio track and simply observed the visuals in front of you, you would find absolutely nothing amiss. I love every single dancer in this clip. I love the black guy in a tux thrusting his hips forward as if he were grooving to Rick James, I love the white couple on the balcony whose entire style of dancing is simply to flip around 180 degrees over and over again, I love the blonde in high heels and tan short shorts with the impressive, shall we say, derriere, I love the blonde in the referee shirt kickboxing in place - I love every God-given second of this clip. Were these kids thinking about how R.E.M. "marked the shift from post-punk to alternative"? Did these kids know that R.E.M. were "laying the groundwork for a new network of venues that would help kick-start the modern rock revolution"? Oh heyyyll no. They didn't give a shit about any of that. They just wanted to dance! And the song got a 95? Pretty good! The purity of this clip can never be taken away from me.

My point is, you didn't exactly see Husker Du's "New Day Rising" ever getting played on American Bandstand. Still, "Stand" is the kind of song that could have been written by Ren and Stimpy, or perhaps Homer Simpson on a good day, or Lloyd and Harry from Dumb and Dumber on a really good day. (Like a few people my age, my initial exposure to "Stand" was from its use as the theme tune to Chris Elliott's Fox sitcom Get A Life - it suited the "adult trapped in adolescence" attitude of the show so well, I simply assumed it had been composed for that purpose). Like the Tom Tom Club's "Genius of Love" before it, "Stand" is what happens when highly intelligent people write an intentionally dumb song. And it wouldn't be the last time either. See this on-the-nose comment from YouTube: "R.E.M. (1988): 'Stand' is our dumbest song. R.E.M. (1991): (Releases 'Shiny Happy People.') R.E.M. (1991): 'Stand' is no longer our dumbest song."

The herky-jerky organ intro conjures up a playful fairground atmosphere (Being for the benefit of Mr. Stipe!), which Mike Mills promptly farts all over with a couple of meaty bass plucks, and off we go. The chord progression is straight out of "La Bamba" or "Twist and Shout"; perhaps the Georgians had been inspired by Los Lobos's recent #1 remake of the former, or Ferris Bueller's Day Off's memorable revival of the latter? Not the usual sources of R.E.M.'s inspiration, if so, but I will allow it. Other favorite touches:

1. The xylophone during the second verse, adding to the song's whole "Fisher-Price" aura
2. The chirping backing vocals that seem to peek out from behind Michael Stipe during the third verse: "Your feet (feet!) are going to be on the ground/Your head (head!) is there to move you around." This is what happens when your song has been hijacked by all those high-pitched gnomes who were hiding in your garden.
3. The ultra-compressed, terrifyingly metallic-sounding background shouts of "Stand!" during the last chorus before the key change, which turn the title into less of an exhortation and more of a military command
4. Stipe's deliberately moronic pronunciation of the final "Stannnnnnn-duh!"

So I think what they're saying is ... that we are supposed to stand?



If there is a more joyous video for "Stand" than the one R.E.M. made, I have not seen it. The vibe I get is of a ragtag cluster of local musicians simply inviting a bunch of friends to town and saying, "Hey, who wants to be in our version of Pee Wee's Playhouse?" The video comes across like the Southern version of Talking Heads' "Wild Wild Life," except this time with some actual wildlife in it. The dancers look more like the habitués of the local bookstore than the supermodels one usually finds on MTV, their choreography admirably hit-or-miss. "Stand" is apparently fun for the whole family, be they kids drawing chalk circles on the pavement, or little old ladies tending their gardens. Let's not forget the obligatory shots of the Georgian countryside, and, holy shit, each member of R.E.M. is jumping into the air and morphing into another member before our very eyes!! (And check out the hair on that lead singer at 3:03.) Honestly, I watch this and I just want to move to Athens, Georgia and frolic in the fields with R.E.M. and all their bohemian art school buddies.

In summary: "Stand" may have been a tasty hint of the alternative explosion that was just around the corner, but it doesn't feel much like an explosion. It feels more like a whoopie cushion. Then again, sometimes a well-placed, strategically employed whoopie cushion can liven up the party like nothing else.

Some Songs That Got Stuck In My Head This Year

As you all wait in anticipation for my favorite songs of the year list, here's a few songs that got stuck in my head this year. I didn't want to completely clutter up my top 5 with retro picks, so I thought I'd throw them into their own blog post.

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Eric Clapton - "It's In The Way That You Use It"



The older I get the more I find myself retreating into older music, especially music from when I was young. It's strange to realize that you are no longer young. I mean, I don't feel old, I often think of myself as some sort of recent college grad, but recently I started realizing how a lot of music that I listen to that I consider "recent" is now closing in on ten or even twenty years old. Yikes! This is what Boomers must feel like when they hear a Beatles song playing over an iPhone ad - hey I remember when this was fresh! I think I'm starting to understand.

Like the following song on this list, I really only fell in love with this song for the extended riff that closes out the song. I've never really listened to Eric Clapton much but holy shit, this guy can rock a guitar! The bit that starts right around the 2:58 minute mark rocks my socks. I also kinda love the little horn section that punctuates the guitar. Then starting at 3:37 Clapton just makes the guitar sing. I had this riff stuck in my head for months. I would wake up in the middle of the night and it would be there, playing over and over in my head, like some carnival ride I enjoyed but couldn't get off of.

The video is that outdated form of motion picture marketing that intersperses cuts from the film with those of the band/artist. Bryan Adams' "(Everything I Do) I Do It For You" might be the pinnacle (or nadir) of this form (and like other Bryan Adams omissions from the Internet, the original video for that song seems to not exist online). Here we see Clapton standing under a blue light alone with nothing but his guitar while various clips play from Martin Scorsese's "The Color of Money" (with Paul Newman and Tom Cruise!). It's really not much of a video - and the song itself, outside of the guitar, is not much either.

Mötley Crüe - "Home Sweet Home"



Now here's a video I actually remember liking at the time it debuted. Yes, like many when I was a wee lad and my music tastes were just starting to develop, my friends and I listened to whatever was popular at the time, which in my case was late 80s hair metal, or what would later be called by the cartoon idiots Beavis and Butthead: butt-rock.

As an aside, upon research for this post, I've discovered that the definition of butt-rock has changed over the years. For me it means the kind of rock that was prevalent in the late 80s right before grunge hit. Think Mötley Crüe, Winger, or Def Leppard. Now when I look online it seems the meaning has changed to the kind of rock that came after grunge/alternative. Think Puddle of Mudd, Limp Bizkit, or any other nu-metal band. Strange.

Anyway, this is once again a song that got stuck in my head, not because of the song itself, but because of the guitar bit that features about two-thirds of the way through. Beginning at 2:03 Mick Mars builds this incredible riff that, like Mr. Clapton's contribution above, I just cannot get out of my damn head. This thing rides down the center fissure of my brain hemispheres like Luke flies the Death Star trench run. I simply want it to go on for longer - I would take a five minute version of this riff alone.

I chose the "'91 Remix" version because this is the video version I remember the most. The '91 version actually peaked at 37 in January of 1992 (the Crüe's last top 40 hit). It's amazing to think how just how far into the 90s hair metal lasted. I think there's a misconception that the moment grunge came into being, hair metal vanished. But they really did coexist for a while. The same week "Home Sweet Home" hit its peak "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was no. 9. But they were both destined to be bested by everyone's favorite "Ladies-and-gentlemen-Mr.-Elton-John!" hit "Don't Let the Sun Go Down On Me" coming in at no. 4 that week by a former member of Wham!.

Madonna - "Bad Girl"



While I absolutely love 80s Madonna I also very much like the not quite as popular 90s Madonna. Now that she's been around so long we might refer to anything post "Vogue" as middle-period Madonna. She went and got all sexual and experimental. Yes, the Erotica album has a lot of filler (I mean, a lot) but there's some amazing tracks on the thing as well.

Enter track six - "Bad Girl". I guess I've always liked this song a bit, but I ran into this song earlier this year and yowza, this thing turned into a major earworm for me. There's an almost hypnotic way she delivers the lines, where some phrases are said quickly, but other more drawn out, that just grabs me. The repeat of the pre-chorus after the bridge at 3:37 (right after Christopher Walken is done dancing) is a wonderful bit of raw Madonna emotion. I can't get enough.

I enjoy the unresolved melancholy of this song. She's not mad at her ex-lover - she's mad at herself. It's a song you'd sing to yourself after a breakup on a cloudy, rainy day.

When I ran into this video earlier this year I had kinda forgotten about it. "Oh yeah, it's the one with Christopher Walken doing a detectivey Wings of Desire thing." But upon re-watching it this year I could tell without confirmation that once again it's a David Fincher directed Madonna video (see "Express Yourself", "Vogue", "Oh Father"). The reason I knew this is because as I watched the video it indelibly reminded me of the video for Aerosmith's "Janie's Got a Gun" (also directed by Fincher). A moody cinematic whodunit with a detective-like figure trying to figure out a death featuring an attractive woman? BINGO. I guess you could say Fincher was, uh, developing a style.

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Well that's it for now. Stay tuned for my upcoming favorite songs of the year!

"Praying For Time," Settling For A Blank Screen Instead

SERIOUS. This song is so SERIOUS. You've heard of Curious George? Well how about Serious George? And if people didn't like Serious George? Then you know what? Maybe George didn't feel like being their kind of pop star. He didn't need no Man in the Yellow Hat buying his damn music.

My family didn't have MTV in our cable package back in 1990, but somehow I must have caught the "Praying for Time" video on another, less expensive channel. Apparently it was a video so arresting, even those lowly network channels knew they had to broadcast it at some point. You know the video for "One More Try," where George is just standing there in a gothic-looking apartment for six minutes and virtually nothing happens, but it's mesmerizing anyway? The video for "Praying for Time" is like the video for "One More Try," except without the video. Forget George Michael (if you were hoping to catch a glimpse of The Bearded One, pull up a chair 'cause it might be a while); there isn't even any other nice stuff to look at. The entire video consists of the lyrics appearing and disappearing on a black screen. That's it. That's all she wrote. No if's, and's or but's. They say that if you stare long enough at this video, you'll begin to see stubble. Now, plenty of alternative acts, such as The Replacements and the Pixies, had turned their music videos into metaphorical middle fingers, but none of those acts were multi-platinum superstars, were they? With the video for "Praying for Time," George was all but saying to the record-listening public, "You want a video? Here's your fuckin' video."

Ten-year-old me thought this was the most brilliant concept anyone had ever conceived of in the history of popular entertainment.

Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I feel like, by this time, videos had steadily been growing more and more opulent, more and more expensive, more and more indulgent. By 1990, videos were such a "thing." Hell, if I recall correctly, MTV was airing "making of" documentaries about the making of music videos! Suddenly, along came a video that was so bare-bones, so basic, calling it a video was like calling a Hot Pocket a meal, or calling Monaco a country. The media and the gossip columnists and the hoi-polloi were all sitting around, as they did with every other mega-star of the era, wondering what could George Michael possibly be coming up with next? And he gave them ... the total opposite of that. With one simple gesture, he was essentially expressing to the unthinking masses, "Who gives a crap about 'the next George Michael video'? I've had it with all this 'blowing your mind with my next video' shit. Just listen to the fucking song, fer Chrissakes." A gesture which, ironically, blew my mind.

You see, the "Praying for Time" video was, in my tiny pop music world, that rarest of creatures: something I had never seen a recording artist do before. I was also, at that age, entirely unfamiliar with, say, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, Metal Machine Music, or Tusk. Every pop singer I'd ever encountered seemed to be desperately trying to give the people exactly what they wanted. As far as I was concerned, this video, and the "content" of the lyrics, meant one of two things: instant career suicide, or a complete reinvention that would take George's success to an entirely new level. It didn't end up being either of those things, but career context aside, I've always thought this was some good shit. "Praying for Time" is serious, all right - seriously awesome.



Now that I have listened (without prejudice) to pre-1980s pop music, I realize that, with its methodical acoustic chug, "Praying for Time" reeks of that solo John Lennon, "Instant Karma!"/"Mind Games"/"Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" vibe. George apparently gave the engineer one solitary instruction: "TREBLE. NEEDZ MOAR TREBLE." Seriously, you could blast this sucker in the next room and I wouldn't even feel it through the walls, that's how little bass there is. And ECHO. An entire Lennon solo album's worth of echo - on one song. George wanted to make it SNAP in your ears, like an infant's wail.

If I were in a less generous mood, I might suggest that the lyrics of "Praying for Time" betray the songwriter's unfamiliarity with a more philosophical or political style of writing. Sure, "One More Try" and "Kissing a Fool" successfully took his post-Wham! music in a more "adult" direction, but if "Praying for Time" had a subtitle, it would be "I Am An Important Artist Now." In places he seems a bit in over his head. "I guess somewhere along the way/He must have let us all out to play"? Let us all out to play? That sounds kind of ... awesome! I love playing! I think what George was trying to say was that, in the words of Trent Reznor, "God is dead/And no one cares/And if there is a hell/I'll see you there," but the lyric makes God sound like the universe's best PE teacher. "Your television takes a stand"? Pretty sure my television doesn't have any thoughts on AIDS or Apartheid, last time I checked. "And what was over there ... is over here"? Holy shit, stuff is there, then it's here, and I just can't handle how stuff keeps moving from there to here! (The surface banality of the lyric is arguably rendered comical by the massive chord change beneath the word "here"). Throughout the song I can practically hear George thinking, "OK, so how can I make this deep?" What rhymes with "yours"? How about "door"? Does "scream from behind your door" sound dramatic, even though it's kind of generic? Like his heroes Stevie Wonder and Bernie Taupin before him, I think he just shrugged and thought, "Eh, close enough." It's the kind of song that, if sung on the school playground, would have been easy to make raspberry noises at.

Yet given George's untimely passing, I think the song plays a bit differently now than it did in 1990, or even in 2015. Before, one was tempted to chuckle at our dear Georgios Kyriacos's sudden attempt to become Billy Bragg. But now, he sounds like an omniscient prophet of doom, howling from beyond the grave, damning us mere mortals for the foolishness of our ways. Now the lyrics come off as poignant, pointed, bitter, and uncompromising. "Charity is a coat you wear twice a year"? See, that's why I never give to charity at all: because at least no one can accuse me of pretending to care for appearance's sake. Frankly, it's hard not to love a US chart-topping single that suggests God has disowned all of humanity, as if he were the strict cantor father in The Jazz Singer ("I have no son!"). The YouTube comments section is littered with a thousand variations of "George was so ahead of his time," "This song could have been written today," and "Sadly this is still relevant." "Praying For Time" is like George Michael's own "Imagine": good before, but even better now that he's dead.

I think the chorus is what keeps the song from becoming a preachy diatribe from some rich pop star who has suddenly realized that he "cares." George doesn't pretend to have any answers other than to, in the words of Kurt Vonnegut, "behave decently in an indecent world." "It's hard to love," he sings, but that doesn't mean you should cease doing it. God may have stopped keeping score, but to George, that isn't permission to suddenly become an eager member of the "What's mine is mine and not yours" crowd. God may have stopped keeping score, you rich Yuppie tightwad, but George Michael certainly hasn't. "Wounded skies above": now there's an image for you. Notice how George doesn't himself say that "it's much, much too late," but that the wounded skies above are saying it, which suggests that he personally might disagree with the skies and that he still believes the human race can be saved. It takes some guts to disagree with the wounded sky, you know what I'm saying? I'm inclined to interpret the final line as George proposing a legal loophole to God's judgment, like the knight in The Seventh Seal trying to cheat death via a board game. "Hmm, so if the skies are saying that it's too late, maybe what we should be praying for isn't 'peace' or 'wisdom' or 'love' or any of that crap, but 'time.'" Whoa. Professor Higglediggle writes:

"Praying For Time" resituates the temporal intransigence of the cosmos in a post-Nietzschean framework, proposing the elasticity of human experience without undermining the value of what Heidegger referred to as "Dasien," or the "being for whom being is a question." Michael's declaration that "God's stopped keeping score" suggests an embrace of Schopenhauer's philosophical pessimism, but this tendency is immediately countered by the concept of "play," which (re)purposes Sartre's notion of man as "being condemned to be free" as a jest by a parental agent whose indifference renders the universe absurd, a concept promulgated by the track's music video which, in the words of Camus, illustrates "the confrontation between human need and the unreasonable silence of the world" with its intermittent flashes of language divorced from further visual embellishment, forcing the viewer to negate any inherent meaning and create his/her own ethical values in response to the confrontational void.

Sure, Man, Write A Blog Post About "What I Am," Whatever, No Big Deal

I'm not aware of too many hits by Edie Brickell & the New Bohemians, but I know what I know about this one, if you know what I mean.

In retrospect, a better name for Edie Brickell & the New Bohemians might have been Edie Brickell & the Proto-Slackers. "What I Am" is like the inaugural salvo of  '90s slacker rock. If there existed a Mount Rushmore of slacker rock, Edie Brickell's face would surely be on it, alongside Alex Chilton's, Gordon Gano's, and Paul Westerberg's. I've heard it said that if one smokes a little too much pot, and if one is not listening too closely to "What I Am," one might literally hear her sing the lyrics "Oh well, whatever, nevermind." Its potent aura of detached apathy would rapidly become ubiquitous, but must have seemed novel in 1989, when this peaked at #7. I feel like no piece of news, no matter how significant, could have punctured Edie's veneer of coffee house cool. "Edie, the Berlin Wall just came down!" "I dig it, man." "Edie, Hitler just exterminated 6 million Jews!" "Whatever man, religion is a smile on a dog." "Edie, aliens just landed on the White House lawn!" "Hey, cool, do they wanna come to my poetry reading tomorrow night?" It takes a lot to rile Edie up.

My guess is that roughly the same amount of people only know of "What I Am" because they've asked themselves the question, "Hey, what is Paul Simon's wife famous for?" as the amount of people who know that Edie Brickell ended up marrying Paul Simon because they asked themselves the question, "Hey, whatever happened to that singer who did 'What I Am'?" If you crunched the numbers, I swear it would break about even. I'll bet many casual music fans know this song but are still unaware that the singer ended up marrying Paul Simon. I mean let's face it, on the celebrity couple totem pole, they're not exactly John and Yoko, or Madonna and Sean Penn. They don't perform together. They don't pose naked on album covers together. They seem like normal people. At least she doesn't owe her fame to her husband - unlike her husband, of course, who owes his fame entirely to Art Garfunkel.

But back to the song. Seriously, I don't hear a shred of '80s here. If you told me that "What I Am" came out in 1993, I would, without hesitation, believe you. At a quick glance, it appears to be in the folk-based, Suzanne Vega/Tracy Chapman vein, but upon closer inspection, it's got more than a hint of funk to it. The wah-wah guitar solo wouldn't have been out of place on a Spin Doctors record. Here is the blend that Sheryl, Alanis, Sophie B. Hawkins and company would take to the bank, my friends.



Just look at 'em! She's got hippie chick hair, jeans, a beaded necklace, and she spends 80% of the video not giving a fuck where the camera is. The bassist is wearing a tie-dye t-shirt and has a goatee, for crying out loud. They look like they just returned from an exhausting round of hackey sack outside the local Peace Corp. office. Are you positive they never toured with Blues Traveler and Phish at some point during the OJ trial? The ultimate irony of Edie Brickell & the New Bohemians is that Edie Brickell & the New Bohemians hardly benefited from the apathetic, flannel-drenched wave they helped usher in. Not that they would have cared anyway.

"Summer Rain," Yuppie Pain AKA Belinda Goes Buckmaster

A sullen widow cries in the dark. A train whistle howls in the distance. An unrelenting torrent of droplets pelts the glass pane. Humanity gazes achingly into the fevered belly of its own corroded soul. The Midwestern sky dramatically severs itself in two as the American Dream groans with Rockwellian rage. I bring you ... Belinda Carlisle's "Summer Rain."

During that first fateful listen to Belinda's Her Greatest Hits in December of 2010, I must admit that I was not terribly impressed with the material I had not heard on the radio before, which was about ... 70% of the work before me? That said, "Summer Rain," at least, struck me as "pleasant." "Hey, if you've gotta fill out your greatest hits collection with a bunch of random album tracks, you could do a hell of a lot worse," is roughly what I thought, in between clicks of Mahjong Titans. Turns out that, despite my never having heard it before, "Summer Rain" had actually been a hit - not a huge hit, mind you, but a respectable one: it peaked at #30 in the US and #23 in the UK. In fact, it is, to date, her very last US Top 40 hit, Go-Go or solo (to be fair, she's still around and, hey, maybe a remix of one of those tracks from her Kundalini yoga album sung in Gurmuhki - I am not making this up - could always catch on out of nowhere). Amusingly enough, the single did best in Australia, peaking at #6; supposedly, there is an Australian "Summer Rain" dance that the audience performs whenever Belinda sings this Down Under (which I imagine is more impressive than the dance she performs in the video).

But, as with "Leave a Light On," it was a tiny detail I spotted on the song's Wikipedia page that made me do a Jim Carrey-style double-take and re-evaluate my initial indifference. Hold on, did I just read that the string arrangement was done by ... Paul Buckmaster?

You mean the Paul Buckmaster?

The same Paul Buckmaster who devised the string arrangements for David Bowie's "Space Oddity"? The Rolling Stones' "Moonlight Mile"? Harry Nilsson's "Without You"? Carly Simon's "You're So Vain"? You mean the same Paul Buckmaster who crafted all those haunting string arrangements on my cherished early '70s Elton John albums? You know, the self-titled album, Tumbleweed Connection, Madman Across the Water, etc.? We're talking "Your Song," "Burn Down the Mission," "Levon," "Have Mercy On the Criminal." That Paul Buckmaster?



Let's get something straight here. Landing Paul Buckmaster would not have been like landing some random record industry professional to write your string arrangements for you. Landing Paul Buckmaster would have been like landing George Harrison to play your guitar solo for you. Buckmaster string arrangements were distinctive pieces of work. Buckmaster string arrangements were vigorous, brooding, forceful, bold, violent. Buckmaster string arrangements rocked you like a guitar riff rocked you. Buckmaster string arrangements grabbed you by the lapel and said, "Did you just say that string arrangements are only meant to be heard in the background?" Buckmaster's string arrangements were prominent.

Now, I don't know if it was Rick Nowels, or Rick Nowels's buddy, or someone further on up the MCA chain who got Paul Buckmaster to do the string arrangement for "Summer Rain," but I do know this: Belinda knew what she was getting. How do I know this? In Lips Unsealed, she goes out of her way to state that Elton John was one of her musical heroes (I swear to God, we have the exact same taste in music). And sure, lots people are casual Elton John fans who wouldn't know Paul Buckmaster from Grandmaster Flash, but, come on, she knew. Just check out this recently-posted cover of "I Need You To Turn To," a deep cut from Elton's self-titled 1970 breakthrough album, and tell me that she wasn't stoked back in 1989 that she snagged Paul Buckmaster to do the string arrangement on "Summer Rain." Yeah. She knew.

So after seeing that little factoid on Wikipedia, I thought to myself, "All right, guess I need to listen to this shit again." And ... you can see where this is going. The Buckmaster/Elton John connection got my initial attention, but I quickly realized that what I had on my hands here was another sleeper Belinda gem. Sure, it might have received some airplay in 1990, but it hasn't received any airplay since - and I'm not entirely sure why that is, because I'd rather hear "Summer Rain" in the department store than the umpteenth airing of "(Everything I Do) I Do It For You." I'd put "Summer Rain" up there with anything else Belinda ever did, and coming from me, by God, that is saying something. So would she; Belinda has gone on record as stating that "Summer Rain" is probably her personal favorite of all her solo tracks. "Summer Rain" dares to give Yuppie Rock a good name.

Because "Summer Rain" is bleaker than Leonard Cohen's worst nightmares. From Wikipedia: "The song is about a man who goes away to war and leaves his wife, saying that nothing will change—they will be together forever and always ... The song is set in the present as his widow sings it, remembering the last time she saw him." She's singing the song to her DEAD LOVER. This is some poetic melancholy shit people. And here I was, just assuming it was another bland love song with a string arrangement that was not done by Paul Buckmaster. Never judge a book by its cover:

Whispering our goodbyes, waiting for a train
I was dancing with my baby in the summer rain
I can hear him saying "nothing will change"
Come dance with me baby, in the summer rain

I remember the rain on our skin
And his kisses hotter than the Santa Ana winds
Whispering our goodbyes, waiting for a train
I was dancing with my baby in the summer rain

I remember laughing 'till we almost cried
There at station that night
I remember looking in his eyes

Oh my love, it's you and that I dream of
Oh my love, since that day
Somewhere in my heart I'm always
Dancing with you in the summer rain

Doesn't matter what I do now
Doesn't matter what I say
Somewhere in my heart I'm always
Dancing with you in the summer rain

You see, "Summer Rain" is a bit more ... narrative-driven than B.C.'s usual fare. To paraphrase Linda Rondstadt and Aaron Neville, I don't know much about songwriters Robbie Seidman and Maria Vidal, but I know I love them, since they provided a refreshing change of pace from the usual Nowels-Shipley Hallmark-fest ("Love Never Dies," "Vision of You," etc.). Do the lyrics explicitly mention her lover's death? Do the lyrics of "American Pie" explicitly mention Buddy Holly? It's called subtlety, people. The most blatant hint is the line "It was the last time that I saw him, in the summer rain." Maybe he just skipped town after he got back from duty. Look, who am I to question Wikipedia? I also hope that Seidman and Vidal were not intending the story to take place in Southern California, despite the reference to the Santa Ana winds, as any native Californian knows that it does not rain in the summer. Period. Sure, about once every three to four years there will be a freak summer thunderstorm, but it's on the rare side. In fact, if it actually did rain in California in the summer, I might be finishing this blog post from my home computer and not my work computer instead (thank you, PG&E). And one more thing: Southern California is not a region littered with trains. I imagine Belinda and her doomed soldier to be waving their tearful goodbyes somewhere in the South, or the Midwest. I expect the geographical references in my forgotten Belinda Carlisle Yuppie Rock hits to be accurate, damn it.

So yes, I came for the string arrangement (which, like all Buckmaster arrangements, caresses the track in its dionysian grip, and which can be heard more extensively on the album mix), but I stayed for the melodrama. A couple of nice touches: 1) the verses are powered along by what sounds like a marimba (how many Belinda songs can claim that?); 2) the low, buzzing drone of guitar right before the second and third chorus, like a hive of cicadas lurking in the humid evening gloom. The overall air of restraint arguably makes the grimness of the lyrics all the more effective, as if Belinda is too catatonic to vent her grief properly. She's too dead inside to aim for true catharsis.



I feel ambivalent about Belinda letting her inner country singer loose on her delivery of the word "dayy-aynce," but nothing gets me going like the sight of Belinda in a long black short-sleeved dress (with just the right hint of cleavage) "dayy-ayncing" in an old rustic barn while CGI clouds zoom eerily past the window. I believe this was her "early 1990" look: hair still red, but straightened out and clipped just above her shoulders, with a dose of (fake?) black eyelashes. And if you were expecting me to complain about the sight of Belinda drenched by rain, you are going to be mistaken. What else? The director really went for that 4th of July/Main Street U.S.A. aesthetic, complete with sepia-tinted shots of brass band and an impressively WASPy fake family standing next to Belinda on the ol' family porch, waving cluelessly in slow motion (your son is never coming back, you fools!). My favorite shots are the ones of Belinda in a long black trenchcoat (0:04, 1:31, 2:45, 3:10, 3:27), strolling dejectedly along the seaside. Let's call this her "sexy grieving widow" look. And how about all those sexy shots of fighter planes, gravestones, sonar screens, and radar dishes? After putting it off for several years, I just recently re-watched The Deer Hunter, and, honestly, throw in a couple of shots of sadistic Vietcong guards forcing Belinda's hubby to play Russian roulette in a bamboo cage, and this video would pretty much amount to the same thing.

There seems to be an amusing tug of war in the YouTube comments between those praising Belinda for her "classiness" as opposed to the female stars of today, and those pointing out that Belinda might have been even more fucked up than the skankiest pop whores of 2019, but just knew how to hide it better. Why argue when the correct answer is "all of the above"?

Wearing a long black dress, still looks hotter than most of the pop singers today.

a video from a time when women didnt need to dress like whores to sell their music.

Oh the memories... One of Belinda's most beautiful love songs! She looks so Beautiful and classic, reminds me of a younger Priscilla Presley. I think she looked great as a Blonde, but have always loved that fierce Auburn on her!

I would dance with Belinda in the Summer Rain, sunshine, or in the snow if I had to!

heres the difference between now and then.....belinda was hot and sexy but her career didnt depend on it because she was a real musician. she could sing, she could write songs and as a guy i genuinely liked her music. the same cant be said for 99 percent of todays female pop stars. the 80s had a balance between sexuality and innocence where i not only wanted to fuck her but wouldnt mind waking up next to her every day, where todays women, my urge is to fuck them then send them packing.

eh? sorry to contradict but this was the era when madonna was masterbating on stage wearing JPG conical bras!

She was very luck to get off so easily with the American public. Belinda and crew did more coke and partied more than Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan or any of the other divas out there today. Of course Belinda had talent. :D

no one, no female singer, that I can think of, can ope their throat and just let it out like Belinda Carlisle!!!!! One in a million, baby!

Such a perfect pop song. Runaway Horses deserves a Pitchfork review getting a 10 and hipsters discovering the greatest pop album of the late 80s!

Why is she sniffing her armpit?

she's not - ever seen flamenco dancers? B smell like summer rain if you are wondering - she's perfect and extraordinary.

"Rhythm Nation": A Dangerously Unstable, And Yet Extremely Funky, Young Republic

I've heard of Woodstock Nation, Red Sox Nation, even Fast Food Nation, but what precisely is a "Rhythm Nation"? Is it a nation where only terrific dancers are allowed to become citizens? A nation where only percussionists are allowed to vote? A nation where every presidential candidate is obligated to begin their stump speech by beatboxing? I'm about 98% certain that Janet Jackson, Jimmy Jam, and Terry Lewis had no idea either; they probably thought the phrase just sounded cool - and they were right!

I mean, I'd rather live in a Rhythm Nation than some of the other nations out there. Who do you think they put on their currency? James Brown? Bo Diddley? Etc. etc. And yet, how to make this Rhythm Nation a reality? The trio sat in their Minneapolis studio late one night and asked themselves this critical question: "What would a Rhythm Nation sound like?" The answer: lots of snappy, metallic, clanging stuff! And brief, repetitive samples of Janet saying "bass-bass-bass"! You know, a bunch of chaotic, punchy, hi-tech noises that imitate malfunctioning hard drives!

I get the feeling that Jam and Lewis were trying to conjure up an aural experience that would have, in 1989, evoked "the future," but in 2019 mostly evokes a "1989" idea of the future. Which is fine, because if they'd actually created a song that had managed, against all odds, to capture the sound of a pop music single from 2019, I probably wouldn't like it very much.

How to create a "Rhythm Nation":

1. Sample the guitar break from Sly & the Family Stone's "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)"
2. Place twenty frying pans on the studio floor and whack the hell out of them for five minutes
3. Pick out three eerie descending chords on an organ and play them very slowly
4. Chant out a string of pseudo-slogans and vaguely political phrases that sound anthemic and uplifting on first listen but might not hold up to deep intellectual scrutiny

Works for me! For some reason, "Escapade" continued to garner airplay long after 1990, but I went for about twelve years without ever hearing "Rhythm Nation" on the radio even once, which is funny, because at the time, it was about as ubiquitous as hearing my classmates blurt out "Don't have a cow, man." When I did finally hear it again, I thought, "Well, they sure were using a towering pile of slightly dated production effects, but my nine-year-old self was correct: this song was a serious banger." Let's face it, there is a lot of rhythm in "Rhythm Nation." I fear that if it contained any extra rhythm, it might simply devolve into one long, sustained, five-minute beat. But unlike, say, that Missy Elliott song where she sounds like she's humping a buffet table in an Indian restaurant, "Rhythm Nation" still has melodic hooks and vocal harmonies and all the secret goodies that I crave. It doesn't just smack me over the head for five minutes with one idea.

Is it just me, or does the way in which Janet & Co. bark out that chorus (which to my nine-year-old brain sounded something like "People-Uck-A-Wuck-A-Duck, Wuck-A-Duck-A Wuck-A-Ducka-A-Duck, Of Life") possibly owe more to glam rock than the hip-hop that might have been their actual reference point? And then they mix it up with a little Gregorian chant, as a disembodied, seemingly all-male choir responds with "We are a part of the rhythm nation," successfully demonstrating their military, and spiritual, unity. Another great touch is Janet's little interjections of "Sing it up!" Every time she peppers one of those in there, frankly, I feel inspired to charge into battle against the evil anti-rhythmic forces that threaten to destroy our fiercely pro-rhythmic kingdom. Just when they seem to be repeating themselves, Janet, Jam, and Lewis throw in a gonzo, head-spinning bit like the one around the 1:46 mark, after Janet sings "Things are getting worse/We have to make 'em better." Without warning, all the instrumentation vanishes, leaving Janet and her sisters-in-rhythm to harmonize a capella for about five seconds (I believe they sing "It's time dooo gethuh something get togeh-thuh!") before a squiggly synth and a quick shout of "Come on now" propel us right back into the chorus. Long story short: this song totally gets me going! (Note: the lyrics of that section are actually "It's time to give a damn, let's work together." Did not know this until today.)

What I'm saying is that "Rhythm Nation" was not a case of false advertising. It's propulsive in a way that most late '80s R&B arguably was not. When Janet was recently inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, predictable howls of protest arose from the basements of angry Judas Priest and Iron Maiden fans worldwide, but here's what Def Leppard's Joe Elliott had to say: "Janet Jackson, for all her success ... People might argue that it's not rock & roll, but that 'Rhythm Nation' stuff kicked ass." And I know what he means. Hell, "Rhythm Nation" probably rocks harder than a lot of Def Leppard songs!



I've always assumed that working deep in the bowels of a factory would be a tedious, hazardous, soul-crushing experience, but damn was I off.  Virtually overnight, the video for "Rhythm Nation" must have tripled the number of job applications submitted to industrial warehouses nationwide. When they finally shut those thick metal doors at night ... it's time to get the party started! If Bob Fosse, Devo, and R. Lee Ermey had ever collaborated on a music video, they might have ended up choreographing something like this. At least the edits are spaced infrequently enough so that I can get the sense of Janet & Co. genuinely dancing their fancy dance. But here's what I'm picturing: about five seconds after the video ends, some little old lady in horn-rimmed glasses pokes her head out of the office door and yells, "All right, kids, you had your fun, now get back to work!"

Martika's Desperate Cry In The Dark AKA Drugs Are Bad Mmmkay?

Madonna. Bono. Prince. Cher. Singers for whom only one name is necessary. The surname is a vestigial remnant, a useless footnote from a childhood history no longer relevant to the adoring masses. For these singers, only one name is needed because there could be only one.

And so I give you:

Martika.

In retrospect, Martika's ambitious attempt at singular nomenclature would put her more in the category of a Limahl than, say, a Sting, but sometimes, hey, you've just got to aim for the stars.

Remember that show Kids Incorporated? Neither do I, but apparently it served as a launching pad for the careers of such cultural behemoths as Jennifer Love Hewitt, Stacy Ferguson (AKA Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas), and one Marta Merrero (AKA Martika from ... Martika). By the time she turned 19, Martika set her sights on a recording career, and she had also apparently seen her fair share of the ugly side of '80s children's television programming. Per Wikipedia:

Martika wrote the song about a friend who was battling a cocaine addiction. "I was a little hesitant because I had only written two songs before and they were light songs. I came up to [producer] Michael [Jay] and said I wanted to write about drugs. It was the first time I got the nerve to write about something that was scary for me to talk about, so I did."

You let it all out there, girl! See, it was bold trailblazers like Martika who paved the way for the Liz Phairs and Alanis Morissettes and Courtney Loves of '90s rock. Although none of her lyrical intentions ever registered with me, and I doubt I'm the only one. Laugh if you will at her D.A.R.E.-level naivete, but it's that naked vulnerability that gives "Toy Soldiers" its power. I listen to "Toy Soldiers" and I don't hear a singer who is trying to be "cool," trying to "pose," or trying to sell me some horseshit about life being a bed of roses. No, I hear a singer who's a little bit terrified of the big bad world around her, but isn't going to let her fear prevent her from trying to be a kind, thoughtful, empathetic human being. I also hear an enormously cheesy power ballad, but Martika goes for the gold and doesn't blink.

Actually, you know what "Toy Soldiers" sounds like? "Toy Soldiers" sounds like the best Belinda Carlisle solo hit that Belinda never made. So this is Belinda's ultimate artistic legacy: the recorded works of Martika. Seriously, Martika pulls off the same tricky mixture of sweetness and angst, although her voice doesn't quite flap in the wind like Belinda's does. No, Martika's voice is more like a plastic soccer goal post: sturdy, and yet somewhat replaceable. Now that I think about it, she sounds a bit like Suzanne Vega (Anyone else expect her to break out with "I am sitting in the morning/At the diner on the corner"?). Except for the parts where Martika throws a little growl into the proceedings, like in her delivery of "How could I be so fine with this addiction?" at 1:43 - she's been secretly hiding Bonnie Tyler inside her chest and can barely keep her down! And could Suzanne Vega hit those eerie high notes in the outro? "All fall down! All fall down!" It's like Daryl Hall at chipmunk speed.

Then there's the backing track, which I might describe as a main course of "Time After Time" with a side dish of "Theme from Chariots of Fire," and perhaps a dessert of ... "Take My Breath Away"? Martika comes floating in on a neon wave of processed guitars and churning metronomes, and flutters away on a cloud of PG-13 hair metal solos. Just think: even in two short years (1991), there is no way in hell a ballad that sounded like this could have hit #1, but in 1989, the production here probably didn't even merit a double-take.



The video features everything from an ersatz "rippling water" effect and black-and-white footage straight out of a Guess ad, to shots of Martika's leather jacket-clad "boyfriend" handing over cash (for drugs?) near a payphone (at 3:48) and Martika and said boyfriend arguing violently in a stairwell (at 3:52). "If you don't get off that stuff for good, then it's over for us!" I'm also pleased to note that Martika has taken lessons from the Belinda Carlisle School of Music Video Choreography, which consists of crossing and uncrossing your arms, jerking your head backwards, clenching your fists, and spinning around copiously. In the second-to-last shot, our heroine, dressed in black, places a flower on a grave. Did her boyfriend ... OD? Is she paying respects to her treasured aunt Esmerelda? Is Martika standing at the grave ... of her own hit-making career? You see, for toy soldiers like Martika, victory is elusive, but the battle over ill-defined music video symbolism ... wages on.

One Blog Post, Believing In Just "Two Hearts" AKA Phil's Medical Bills (And Drug Debt) Finally Lead To The Big Screen

You know, if Prince and Madonna could make it in the movies, then why not Phil Collins?

Stranger things have happened. I mean, look at Mark Wahlberg. Maybe Phil had a little Boogie Nights in him yet? Alas, it looks like Buster was a one-time deal and that Phil would just have to keep his genitals in his pants.

Now, if I told you that, once upon a time, Phil Collins had starred in a movie, and then I added that he never starred in another movie again, you would naturally assume that he gave a terrible performance in said movie, right? Full disclosure: I have never seen, nor do I plan to see, Buster. But those who have seen it say ... he did a fairly decent job. Well take a look at him now. Roger Ebert wrote that Collins played the role "with surprising effectiveness." Amusingly, the critical consensus is that, while the film has its flaws, Phil Collins's acting ... isn't actually one of them. Land of confusion indeed. Being American, I am not familiar with the 1963 Great Train Robbery upon which the film is based, but reading about it on Wikipedia makes me nostalgic for the days when trains actually carried cargo worthy of being robbed. Supposedly, the comedic tone of the film doesn't quite mesh with the amoral actions it depicts. Raise your hand if you predicted that a Phil Collins movie would be criticized for being too "dark." Apparently Prince Charles and Princess Diana were planning to attend the premiere, but Phil discouraged them from doing so as he wanted to keep them immune from the "controversy" surrounding the film's alleged "glorification" of violence. Dear God. Imagine the fallout from members of the royal family attending a Phil Collins train heist movie. The scandal! The outrage! The whole thing could have ended in divorce!

So with the early '60s serving as sonic inspiration, Phil cooked up one hell of a snappy soundtrack single. You might be listening to "Two Hearts" and thinking to yourself, "How the hell did Phil Collins completely nail that Motown sound?" Well, I'll tell you how he did it. He did it by co-writing the song with Lamont Dozier.

You know, Lamont Dozier? As in "Holland-Dozier-Holland"?

The songwriting team consisting of brothers Brian and Eddie Holland and Lamont Dozier was essentially responsible for writing every other Motown hit between 1963 and 1967 (another 25% were probably written by Smokey Robinson, and the remaining 25% were written by about twenty different people). They were a three-pronged hook machine, imbuing their vibraphone-laden choruses with ... I want to say a "jazzy" quality? We're talking "Heat Wave," "Baby Love," "I Can't Help Myself," "How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)," "(Reach Out) I'll Be There" ... frankly, I have better things to do than name all the hits they wrote (like write a blog post about a Phil Collins soundtrack single, for instance). In fact, Phil had already covered one of those hits ("You Can't Hurry Love") and scored his own giant hit with it. How, precisely, he came into contact with Dozier is information that Wikipedia does not provide, but if it was a collaboration that did not generate the headline-grabbing pizzazz of "Phil Collins/Phillip Bailey," it was equally fruitful. Aside from the substitution of what sounds like a keyboard with a "vibraphone" setting for an actual vibraphone, "Two Hearts" generally keeps the '80s at bay. The strings swoop and soar in a decidedly non-'80s-like manner, the backing vocals add just the right amount of tension during the pre-chorus, and honestly, the bridge has to be the bridge to end all bridges! That "Collins/Dozier" songwriting credit on the back of the 45 is one of those tiny and yet heavily revealing details that makes an '80s pop scholar such as myself tilt his head back and say, "Ahhhhh ... so that explains it." Not that Phil hadn't already demonstrated a gift for concise, soulful, elegant pop on his own, but come on: having the D in "HDH" along for the ride didn't hurt.

Having never paid close attention to the lyrics of "Two Hearts" (because ... I have a life?), I initially assumed that they portrayed the more melancholy side of romance, given the minor key nature of the music. Then one day I realized that the sentiment of the song is relentlessly upbeat, the singer essentially stating that he and his lover are practically joined via their aortas for all of eternity. (Confession: until about, oh, an hour ago, I always thought the chorus was "Two hearts/Living in just one mind," which doesn't make any sense, because organs live in the body, not the mind, right? But I think the actual lyric is "Two hearts/Believing in just one mind," which doesn't make any sense either, but at least it feels slightly more poetic. Since when is a mind something you "believe" in? Whatever, I give up.) Given the aching sweep of the melody, I feel like the Hallmark-level nature of the lyrics are a kind of a letdown. My ears tell me that this should be a sad song, not a happy one. The words don't quite do justice to the tune. Basically, I think Phil phoned it in. Maybe he thought, 'Well, this is supposed to be a classic '60s-style radio hit, not another scathing divorce lament. I better make it lovey-dovey." Yes, I know, I'm complaining about the superficiality of the lyrics in a Phil Collins song. But with a series of hooks this ingratiating, it could have been something even more special! As it is, I would call it a perfect "sounding" single that I like to pretend doesn't have lyrics. It's two mismatched moods living in just one Phil Collins song.

Less heralded is Buster's other Collins/Dozier collaboration, "Loco In Acapulco," performed by the (then still active!) Four Tops. Phil also recorded a curiously minimalist cover of Wayne Fontana's "Groovy Kind of Love" for the film, although the original came out in 1966 so he really seemed to be fudging the historical timeline there. Jeez Phil! And somehow even that went to #1 in the US.

Once again, Phil treated the music video for a Motown homage as another excuse to live out his early rock & roll TV variety show fantasies. Here he stars as not only the blasé projectionist, but as the singer, bassist, keyboardist, and drummer of new British beat group the Four Pound Notes ("Yeah, well, there used to be, uh ... five of us Tony"). I feel it is my sacred blogger duty to mention that Phil had already done this "playing every member of the band" bit twice before (in the videos for "I Missed Again" and "You Can't Hurry Love"), but it is also my sacred blogger duty to mention that ... even the third time around, it's still amusing! As keyboardist, Phil seems to be going for the Stephen Stills look, while as bassist, he seems to be going more for the, let's say, Peter Asher (of Peter and Gordon) look. Meanwhile, the drummer is apparently a hardcore jazz guy (and, given the sunglasses, I'm guessing a junkie), slumming it for a quick buck.



I know I grumbled about the lightweight nature of the lyrics, but if Phil is to be believed at least, perhaps I should take that back. From In The Air Tonight:

There'd been signs for years, obviously, but by the time they found me lying unconscious on the floor of a gay bar in Oaxaca wearing a French maid's outfit, I knew things had really gotten out of control. They say that, for 148 seconds at least, I was legally dead. But anyway, after a couple of jolts from the defribrillator, they tossed me on a cot and rushed me on a chopper straight to Cedars Sinai.

The doctor came in wearing a cheap toupee and the sort of solemn countenance that not even Keith Richards could fail to be unnerved by. "Mr. Collins, I'm afraid ... there's only one way to say this ... you've got heart problems."

"What do you mean?"

"Look, it's really none of my business, but ... let's just say I didn't spend six years at UCLA Medical School for nothing. I know the x-rays of a horse tranquilizer addict when I see one, OK?"

I let out a heavy sigh. "Look, Doc, I know, I've got a problem, but I just need to get through this one more solo tour, and then I'll go clean, I swear!"

"Damn it, Collins, don't you get it? You don't turn things around this very minute, you're gonna be just another dead balding drummer with a Rolodex full of ex-wives! This is your wake-up call, man!" The doctor literally grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me vigorously with his arms. "You've got to get ... yourself ... together!"

My head slumped toward the floor. "OK, OK. Just ... what's the diagnosis?"

"Well, it's not merely the horse tranquilizer. I'm picking up traces of paint thinner, varnish, whale antiseptic ... I mean, stuff I haven't seen in years. Your heart's shot to hell. I don't even know how you're still alive."

"Probably that Belgian lab experiment from when I was a kid."

"Your what?"

"Never mind. So what are we talking about here, a heart transplant?"

"I'm afraid it's much worse than that. What we're going to need is a medical miracle, a procedure that's never been done before."

"I don't follow."

"You don't need another heart. I'm afraid the only thing that can save you is ... two hearts."

I blinked three times.

"There's a hospital in Portugal that's pulled off a similar procedure in a goat, but ... it's never been tried in a human."

"Two hearts ... living in just one mind?"

"Precisely."

"But ..." I poked gingerly at my shriveled chest. "Where will you find the room?"

Well, obviously, they figured it out. I had every intention of turning over a new leaf, I did. I'd been given a second chance - it was a sign from God, right? But about three days after the surgery, I found myself in a foul mood (I think I caught "In Too Deep" slipping from #4 to #6 in the charts), and I figured, "Well, between the two hearts, they can probably withstand more usage than just the one, you know?" So ... I went right back on the stuff.

About a month later, I got a call from Hans - you know, my dealer in Copenhagen - demanding this, that, and the other thing.

"Phil, you still owe me twenty thousand krone, you lying prick!"

"All right, all right, all right! but listen Hans, I'm dead broke, I mean really broke. You know what I just had to pay for?"

"What?"

"I had to pay for an extra heart in my chest."

"Really."

"Didn't come cheap."

"Phil, I do not give a fuck about you and your extra hearts. Either pay up or I am sending the big boys."

"No! no! OK, there's gotta be something, a favor I can do, some kind of benefit concert, like that whole Live Aid thing, you name it, I'll do it."

There was a pregnant pause. "Well ... you know ... I have a friend, a film producer, he is involved with this movie about a train robbery..."

"You need someone to do the soundtrack?"

"Well, yes, of course, but what he really needs is ... a lead actor."

I let out a snort. "Hans, forget it. I can't even keep my own pants on these days, let alone star in a fucking movie."

"Twenty thousand krone, Phil, twenty thousand krone ..."

So ... I took the part. And I wasn't half-bad! Had a lot of fun making it. Ran into Lamont Dozier in an adult bookstore in Simi Valley one day, started gushing about how much I loved his work, how he could really use a comeback opportunity, how I had this whole soundtrack album to do, and how Erica's Daughter was a much hotter read than the sequel, Emily's Daughter. Great track, "Two Hearts." But yeah, all the budget money for the video I had to send straight to Hans, so we didn't have any money left over for actors. I told the director no problem, I could do it all myself. Wasn't anything I hadn't done before.

Soul II Soul: R&B Goes British, Positive, Afrocentric, Says "Whoops! Can't Have This"

You thought Boyz II Men knew how to work a roman numeral? Get a load of Soul II Soul.

I have a foggy memory of sitting at home on a typical 1989 afternoon, catching a particular video on television, and thinking to myself, "You know, these black musicians currently dancing on my TV screen are not dancing like the typical black musicians I usually see dancing on my TV screen. Who are these particular black musicians, and where did they come from?" One day I received the answer, and explanation, I was looking for:

Britain. They came from Great Britain.

This ... explained ... everything.



Now, I could be entirely mistaken, but I have the feeling that the African-American experience is slightly different from the, uh ... African-British (I doubt that's the term?) experience. Maybe it's the accents. Maybe it's the fish and chips. Maybe it's the superior educational system. But even at nine years of age, I could sense that Soul II Soul were not cut from the usual American R&B mold that I was familiar with. They looked like the bohemian, cafe-dwelling, poetry-reading, jazz and Earth, Wind & Fire-listening kind of black. They looked like they celebrated Kwanzaa, quoted Langston Hughes and James Baldwin to each other, and had posters of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu in their bedrooms. Just look at their song titles. You didn't usually see tracks called "African Dance" or "Jazzie's Groove" on Bobby Brown albums, is what I'm saying.

Like most of my countrymen, until I got my hands on Soul II Soul's debut album, Club Classics Vol. One (Retitled Keep On Movin' in the US, presumably because the label assumed American consumers would have been too stupid to realize it was not, in fact, a compilation), I had only ever heard two Soul II Soul songs: "Keep On Movin'" and "Back To Life (However Do You Want Me)". These two singles - breezy, elegant, suave, and almost melancholy, but possessing just enough muscle to stand out from the usual Quite Storm fare - were sung by Caron Wheeler. Hence, I concluded - erroneously, but not without company I imagine - that Caron Wheeler (not to be confused with the Sundays' equally enchanting Harriet Wheeler) was the "lead singer" of a mainly song-oriented group named Soul II Soul. My conclusion, though understandable, was WRONG, TOTALLY WRONG.

It turns out that Soul II Soul were more of a dance/electronica/DJ-oriented collective that didn't really focus on recording proper "songs" with verses and choruses per se, or even lyrics. Soul II Soul, God bless them, cast those oh so American musical boundaries aside. Wikipedia lists their genre as "soul/neo soul/dance/R&B/rap/British soul/reggae," but I feel like "neo soul" would have just about covered it (in a way, they were knocking on the door of trip-hop). Some of the tracks on Club Classics Vol. One feature lead singers other than Wheeler, some feature light rapping, and others are flat-out instrumentals. What I'm trying to say is that, if you're wondering why a group that released two excellent hit singles didn't release more of those excellent singles, it's probably because the listening public heard Soul II Soul's other songs that didn't have Caron Wheeler's voice on them and thought, "Wait a minute, this is Soul II Soul? But where's the lead singer?" See guys? You thought you could be all "utopian" and "collectivist" and "boundary-free," but let me tell you something: it doesn't help the brand. Even the Alan Parsons Project, for crying out loud, eventually caved on the lead singer question. But Soul II Soul refused to sell their soul. To paraphrase Graham Nash, "Was the money you didn't make worth the price that you didn't pay?"

But wait, there's more! Not only did Caron Wheeler sing nothing else on the album aside from the singles, but the version of "Back to Life" that appears on the album isn't even the hit version, but rather a radically different, virtually a capella mix. It's like that time in college I was perusing my friend's CD collection, grabbed 2Pac's All Eyez On Me from the rack, and said, "Yeah! Put on 'California Love'!" only to watch him grimace and explain, "Uh ... the version on the album is just this weird remix, it's not the version you actually want to hear." Buzz kill. Oh the problems music consumers used to have that we simply don't have anymore.



So, Soul II Soul's videos. At the time, they might have seemed like a glimpse into R&B's future, but in retrospect they're more like a glimpse into Cornel West's wet dream of R&B's future. So many dreads, so many weaves, so many beads, so many dashikis, so many multi-colored 'do rags ... it's like Maya Angelou on acid. And when was the last time you saw violinists in an R&B video? I almost wished these two videos could just ... keep on moving and not stop. Instead, the moment they end, I find myself coming back to life, back to reality - and, honestly, compared to a Soul II Soul video, my reality is pretty bland. Favorite YouTube comments:

As a kid I swore she said "yellow is the color of some rain". I thought she was saying that sometimes life pisses on you 😂!

Yellow is the color of some race. I used to think that's what she was singing. lol

the summer of '89, i remember brothas bumpin this in their Ford Escorts. the sound systems were more expensive than the car.

This song reminds me of a funny incident that happened back in 1990 when this song was popular and on the radio. I was a sophomore in high school and our class was waiting outside for our teacher. But then we were informed that our teacher was out sick and to wait outside for the substitute. So we were wondering who our sub was going to be and this old lady was walking toward the classroom. Then I guess one of my fellow classmates was hoping the old lady wasn't going to be our sub. As the old lady was coming to open the door, the guy started singing "Keep On Movin, Keep On Movin Don't Stop, No." Man, we just started busting out laughing.

The One Paula Abdul Song I Will Straight Up Defend

Like the approval ratings for ol' Herbert Walker himself, my level of affection for certain artists from the 1989-1990 era has, shall we say, risen and fallen. Paula Abdul may have been Forever Your Girl, but I would not say that all of her four #1 hits (!) from that album have "forever" held up over the years. For instance, the title track sounds like the theme for an all-star ABC sitcom that sadly never was (starring, perhaps, Joey Lawrence, Will Smith, and Alyssa Milano?). "Cold Hearted" now strikes me as a less effective "Maneater," trudging through a well-worn chord progression (Pebbles's "Girlfriend" would like a word) to uncertain effect (judging from the relative apathy in Paula's voice, I feel like this guy's heart is probably lukewarm at worst). "Opposites Attract" is sort of a Gershwin/Porter-style standard on autopilot (for two more plausible, and acidic, '80s treatments on the same theme, I would recommend Billy Joel's "A Room of Our Own" and the Go-Go's' "We Don't Get Along"). But like Madonna and Janet before her (or even Alice Cooper and Kiss for that matter), I can recognize that the chief appeal of Paula Abdul in her heyday wasn't exactly her musical output.

Unnecessarily harsh YouTube users will often insult contemporary pop singers by saying something along the lines of "XXX can't even sing, she's just a fucking dancer." The thing is, if you said this to Paula Abdul, she might actually agree with you.

Paula Abdul was a dancer. She was better than the average dancer. After helping choreograph several of Janet Jackson's Control videos, some opportunistic record executive must have droolingly backed her into a corner at some record release party and laid out a persuasive spiel: "Look Paula baby, you see Janet? You think Janet's got the greatest vocal range? Fuck no. But can Janet make great dance-pop? You God damn right. You could do the same thing. You got looks, you can dance ... think about it baby." And so, Paula Abdul became a dancer with a recording career. How did she do this, you ask? Well, you see, once upon a time, there was this television channel, and it made certain kinds of things possible that simply weren't possible before.

Back in the day, the release of every Paula Abdul single from Forever Your Girl felt like a mini-event - at least to my brother in me as we sat in our parents' car on the way to the mall. The thing is, I don't know if I genuinely liked Paula's singles as songs, or simply as cool music videos that happened to have songs associated with them. I remember my brother and I sitting in the back seat, listening to her singles on the radio, and spending the whole length of the song talking about the "awesome video!" She was dancing with a rapping cartoon cat! What could top that? In hindsight, I can't say I would strongly recommend Paula's old hits to a contemporary listener. It's like reminiscing about MC Hammer, Vanilla Ice, or "Do the Bartman." You sort of just had to be there.

Except for "Straight Up."

For this child of the '80s at least, "Straight Up" holds up. You know why? "Straight Up" is lean, it's mean. "Straight Up" hits hard. Whoever was responsible for "Straight Up" (possibly someone other than Paula?) wrapped up all their whistle-ready hooks and playful synth riffs into one seamless, raunchy little package (Wikipedia is giving me the possibly made-up name of Elliot Wolff). "Straight Up" appears fun and fluffy on the surface, and yet it has a sinister, accusatory bite to it. Take the best tracks from Madonna, Janet, or the Boys of Pet Shop, and let me tell you something: "Straight Up" could straight up go toe-to-toe with any of them. What's funny is that, as a kid, I did not prefer "Straight Up" to her other hits in any way. But now, it's the only one I genuinely enjoy.

A few of the ingredients that do it for me:

1. The "trumpet" synth. I'm a sucker for "trumpet" synth. You know what Van Gogh's problem was? He didn't have enough trumpet synth. Otherwise he might have snapped out of it. The trumpet synth is cute and playful, and yet it adds just enough of a hint of sass.
2. The wah-wah guitar that "answers" the trumpet synth: roll over Isaac Hayes.
3. The blazingly loud multi-tracked electric guitar that pulses through the entire song: Obviously this is a dance-pop song, but do you hear that guitar? Listen to that virile buzz underneath the chorus. It brings almost a stadium rock feel to what could have otherwise been electronic goo.
4. The brief, metallic synth riff that pushes the bridge into the chorus and sounds like a robotic spider rapidly climbing its way up Paula's skirt
5. Paula's quasi-rapping during the bridge ("I've-been-fooled-be-fore-would-n't-like-to-get-my-love-caught-in-the-slam-min-door") which then culminates in a surprisingly high-pitched "pleeeeeeease?"
6. The call-and-response backing vocals during the second verse that dart out from behind Paula in the center channel to stake out their territory on the left and right channels: "Time's standing still/waiting for some (waiting for some) small clue/(Ah-let me tell you now) I keep getting chills/When I think your love (when I think your love) is true." They've got Paula's back, jack.
7. "False" ending: After Paula's "please, please, a-please please", the backing track seems to simmer down noticeably (the guitar intruding much less frequently), while Paula chants a highly abridged version of the chorus ("Straight up now tell me ... tell meeee"). Part of me always assumes this is the start of the fade-out, and while I enjoy this section, a piece of me is always a little disappointed that this is the alleged fade-out, because, for all its merits, it is a bit "low energy." But guess what, I'm in luck, because it's not the actual fade-out. Wisely, the full-fledged, guitar-heavy chorus comes back with guns a-blazing, and the song fades out on that. Phew!

To say I'm not too fond of the other singles from the album is not to say that I don't admire the artistry behind the videos. First of all, one wouldn't think that the film taste of budding young auteur David Fincher and former Laker Girl Paula Abdul would possess much overlap, and yet this just goes to show you how All That Jazz is one of those films that has a little something for everyone. You like bitter, self-loathing, semi-autobiographical, genre-bending late '70s cinema? You'll love All That Jazz. You like none of those things, but you like great dancing? You'll love All That Jazz! I remember viewing Bob Fosse's singular "feel-bad" musical with my co-blogger Herr Zrbo several years ago, and during the "Air-otica" scene, he suddenly turned to me and he said, in a moment of blinding epiphany, "I think I just realized that Paula Abdul's video for 'Cold Hearted' is basically a shot-by-shot re-make of this scene.'" Honestly, until he pointed it out to me, I hadn't realized it either. I knew co-bloggers were good for something. And "Opposites Attract" (not directed by Fincher) is like the best bonus feature the Who Framed Roger Rabbit? DVD release never had.



Unlike the clips for "Opposites Attract" or "Cold Hearted," the video for "Straight Up" sports no obvious gimmick, nor does it cash in on a cinematic reference near and dear to Little Earl's heart. I just find it more compulsively watchable. Every frame oozes ... style. Fincher appears to have employed the grainiest black and white film stock he could find (perhaps one might more accurately describe it as "dark blue and white"?) and the longest telephoto lenses he could get his hands on, making Paula seem as if she's being filmed from 50 yards away and one gentle tap on the cameraman's arm would cause her to fly right out of the frame. Speaking of tap: this is one of those rare instances where the fact that a music video doesn't immediately begin with the song in question doesn't bother me one bit. There's also something laughably simple and yet inherently pleasing about the sight of Paula strutting and swaying in her little mini-trench coat in front of a background that is solid black on the left and solid white on the right. It's like she's dancing the tango with the Parallel Lines album cover. Now I may be able to name more Blondie songs I like than Paula Abdul songs I like, but I'll tell you one thing: Debbie Harry's dancing couldn't hold a candle to Paula's.