“Respect Yourself” by Bruce Willis (1987, #5)

One critic’s view:  “Willis may deeply believe he has vocal talent, but the album stands more as a testament to the excesses of Reagan-era celebrity and baby-boomer nostalgia than as a piece of music.” – Stephen Thomas Erlewine @ AllMusic, reviewing the The Return of Bruno LP

The public’s view:  1.92 / 5.00

Bruce Willis knew there would be a national uproar when he, the leading man of ABC’s Moonlighting, announced that he was now also a pop musician.  The timing could not have been worse.  Dumpsters were already jammed to capacity with records by Don Johnson, Tom Wopat, David Hasselhoff, and Lisa Whelchel, and no one was in the mood for yet another network star who thought that he could sing.  The TV-to-top-40 crisis had even caught the attention of policymakers in Washington, and the Steer Clear Of Totally Tuneless Blundering Actors’ Incompetent Output Act was working its way through Congress.  But Willis softened the blow of his selfish decision by channeling his rock ‘n’ roll ambitions through a fictitious alter ego named Bruno Radolini.  This led to one of the more ridiculous aspects of 1987:  the one-hour HBO comedy music special The Return of Bruno.

The Return of Bruno features a surprisingly strong cast of entertainment legends, including Dick Clark, Elton John, Michael J. Fox, Jon Bon Jovi, Ringo Starr, Grace Slick, Brian Wilson, Phil Collins, and even the Bee Freaking Gees.  In documentary style, these performers matter-of-factly recount Bruno’s career and how he has influenced them.  Bruno is evidently a Forrest Gump-like figure who was present at many important moments in music history.  He introduced Ringo to George Harrison.  He sang at Woodstock.  He helped Elton workshop “Bennie and the Jets”.  Too bad Bruno didn’t short out the studio console with a kettle of boiling fish oil to prevent Phil Collins from recording “Separate Lives”.

The celebrity appearances in The Return of Bruno are interspersed with clips of Willis performing as Bruno in various costumes and wigs.  It’s all sort of humorous, but the special completely shifts gears halfway through.  It morphs into a straight-ahead concert performance with Bruce singing and playing the harmonica and doing that trick where he puts his finger in his mouth and makes a popping noise.  I just discovered, for the first time in my long life, that I can safely execute that same trick.  My HBO special will be airing in October.

The cable TV mockumentary generated some goodwill for Bruce Willis, but he burned a good chunk of it by releasing a companion album.  The lead single was a remake of the Staple Singers tune “Respect Yourself”.  “Respect Yourself” has always struck me as an oddity, being one of very few hit songs that broadly denigrates the moral character of its audience.  Even its choice of vocabulary is odd.  It refers to a Christian minister as a “gentleman” whose preaching should be welcomed, then the very next line uses “gentleman” to describe the listener – who is presumed to be a bigoted young man who cusses around women and doesn’t cover his mouth when he coughs.  Nonetheless, it is regarded by many as a classic song about the Black Experience.  With Willis’s remake, it also became a not-so-classic song about the Overexposed Celebrity Experience.

Willis’s version of “Respect Yourself” is essentially an uncredited duet with the Pointer Sisters, and he lets them do much of the heavy lifting.  There is a lot of experience and talent that goes into a world-class act like the Pointer Sisters.  The group must have auditioned dozens of great singers before they found June Pointer, Anita Pointer, and Ruth Pointer.  The contrast between their professionalism and Willis’s lazy, untrained vocal is consistent with the rest of the Bruno Radolini project, which oscillates between self-deprecation and vanity.  First we are instructed to laugh at the absurdity of Bruce Willis as a rock star, and then a moment later we are supposed to unironically accept him sharing the stage with top-tier musicians.  The whole thing comes across as a humblebrag like what you might see in a LinkedIn post:

“My producer enlisted the Pointer Sisters to sing with me on my album.  I was intimidated by their background and expertise, which quite frankly blows mine out of the water.  But true rock stardom is not about being the best singer in the room.  It’s about prancing around a pool hall with a broom in your hand on MTV.  The Pointers brought synergy to the project and allowed me to reach my full potential.  By standing on the heads of three musical giants from Oakland, I was able to rise taller.  #PersonalGrowth #4thPointerSister #YouCantAvoidMeAnywhereNowCanYou”

In the pantheon of enduring Bruce Willis works, “Respect Yourself” ranks somewhere between his Seagram’s wine cooler commercials and his portrayal of Sheriff Ben Watts in the direct-to-obscurity thriller American Siege.  It wasn’t the most awful thing on the radio, but it galls me that Willis’s singing had to ruin part of an otherwise decent Pointer Sisters record.

My rating:  3 / 10

“Ballerina Girl” by Lionel Richie (1987, #7)

One critic’s view:  “I realize there’s a place in this world for quieter songs, but this song is so slow I think the tempo is written in negative numbers.” – Todd in the Shadows

The public’s view:  2.13 / 5.00

I will say this for Lionel Richie:  his songs are the absolute opposite of misogyny.  He always expresses an almost servile sense of admiration for women.  Maybe there’s an exception lurking deep in his discography, a nasty diatribe in which Lionel calls his Aunt Flossie a bitch or something like that, but I doubt it.  Even his two big Commodores songs about the joys of ending a relationship – “Easy” and “Sail On” – are so mellow and relaxed that it’s hard to detect much bitterness toward the ladies involved.  I think the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame decided to induct Richie and Eminem in the same year so that they would cancel each other out.

“Ballerina Girl” fits right in with Richie’s fawning-over-awesome-females addiction.  My research reveals that he wrote it for a young girl named Nicole who Lionel and his wife were in the process of adopting as their daughter.  I am sure I originally heard this fact on American Top 40 back in 1987 but declined to commit it to memory.  I needed the brain space for more captivating and useful information, like the chemical formula for Altoids and the names of the 100 largest cities in Pennsylvania.  I guess I’ve always tried to avoid knowing anything about “Ballerina Girl”.  Many other music fans share my antipathy for the tune.  It has been rated as our mustachioed friend’s worst hit single, and it serves as a sad punctuation mark at the end of his long string of top tens.

One of the problems with “Ballerina Girl” is that it is quite specific compared to Richie’s other ballads.  “Truly” was never going to spur a listener to jubilantly bounce his butt around on the dance floor, but at least it was a heartfelt general-purpose love song.  “Ballerina Girl”, on the other hand, is relatable only to ballerinas and those who adore them.  That isn’t much of an audience because, as actor Timothée Chalamet was recently praised for pointing out, ballet is not very popular anymore.  It peaked in the 1800s and has declined ever since.  The typical modern family doesn’t attend a ballet more than a couple times a month, and most folks are entirely unfamiliar with the nomenclature of the sport.  They think that an arabesque is a type of horse and a grand jeté is the big stream of water that spouts from the low-rise drinking fountains that you find in Parisian hotel bathrooms.  Even Nicole Richie seems to have abandoned her ballet ambitions, focusing her talents on slightly less pointless pursuits such as TikTokking and unscripted television.  She was appointed Ambassador of Urban Decay in 2017, with no senators of either party opposing her confirmation to this post.  (Add this to the file of 100% true facts that you probably think I made up.)  I haven’t heard much about her recent activities, but I doubt that she’s trying to eke out a living performing Swan Lake in front of three people.

For the 99.9238% of us who have no interest in ballet, “Ballerina Girl” is just a man bragging about his daughter.  We may as well listen to a song called “Thin Mint Sales Champ” or “Spelling Bee Brat”.  But at least Lionel made sure to accompany his praise of Nicole with some of the most boring music in a pop hit since the Great Soft Rock Apocalypse of 1981.

My rating:  3 / 10

“Heartbeat” by Don Johnson (1986, #5)

One person’s view:  “Was nobody nearby to shout a loud:  ‘Stop singing!!!’ when this was produced?!?” – Headphonian @ Rate Your Music, regarding the Heartbeat LP

The public’s view:  2.52 / 5.00

Miami Vice premiered at the perfect time to grab my attention.  I had recently abandoned my favorite TV show, The Dukes of Hazzard, because I was slowly starting to suspect that the Duke boys were never going to successfully assassinate Boss Hogg.  I was yearning for a new series to fill the void.  However, Miami Vice’s marketing was so off-putting that I never got around to tuning in.  It seemed as though the show’s hero, Detective Sonny Crockett (played by Don Johnson), was constantly canoodling with pretty women on yachts while smoking premium cigarettes and eating exotic foods such as braised eagle hearts and Acapulco-style tiramisu.  This didn’t hold any appeal for me.  A police drama is supposed to be about destructive car chases, not glamour and conspicuous consumption!  Crockett wouldn’t last a day in Hazzard County.  One speck of mud on his stylish suit and he would be on the first Ferrari back to Florida.

It may be an unfair perception, given that I didn’t actually watch the show, but I saw Miami Vice as emblematic of 1980s entitlement culture.  This was the era in which a new breed of entitled twit was invented:  guys who can’t understand how poverty exists when the markets are doing so well.  Why don’t the homeless simply cash out their stock gains and buy houses?  (We still have these twits today, but most of them are either in Congress or are hosting podcasts.)  Don Johnson’s brief singing career was also the product of entitlement.  If record contracts had been based on musical talent, rather than starring in a hit TV show, he’d be waiting near the back of a long queue for his turn on the Hot 100.

Johnson is really not a bad vocalist as compared to the average person.  If I was working with him in a cubicle farm somewhere and we all went out for office karaoke night, my reaction would be:  “Gee, I didn’t know that Don had pipes like that.  His singing is even better than his widely praised PowerPoint skills.”  It is, however, a long leap from karaoke to the Billboard charts.  Successful recording artists usually have something distinctive about their styles, but Johnson’s Heartbeat LP is the most generic mid-‘80s pop-rock record that I’ve ever heard.  If I find an obscure album by someone named John Donson in a discount bin, and the cover is just a picture of a guitar flying over a bunch of random geometric shapes, I would expect it to sound exactly like Heartbeat.  I am not saying this to throw shade at Don, because I would much rather hear generic 1986 music than generic 2009 music.  An album by the Wack Eyed Bees, with a picture of an Auto-Tune console on the sleeve, is not worthy of buying no matter how steep the discount.

The title track of Heartbeat fits right in with the rest of the album.  Its lyrics are comprised of a vague complaint directed at an ex, followed by some cryptic rumblings about seeking a new mate who will be better in some way.  All of this has something to do with a heartbeat, a word that is repeated with emphasis at least 30 times.  The music is just as nondescript as the lyrics.  It’s anchored by a scratchy guitar that would have sounded better if Dweezil Zappa had played on the track instead of just pretending to in the video.  Johnson holds things together OK for the first couple of minutes, but then the song changes its key and pushes him to reach greater heights of vocal prowess.  Karaoke Don isn’t up to the challenge.  By the end I have a mental image of Sonny Crockett’s yacht sinking into the sea, with a few bubbles rising to the surface along with a premium cigarette and the jacket from a stylish suit.

Johnson might be able to out-sing Eddie Murphy at a karaoke bar, but Murphy’s “Party All the Time” was at least catchy.  “Heartbeat”, by contrast, is a composition that relies on expressive musicianship rather than a strong hook.  Its lead singer and its lead guitarist determine whether the song lives or dies.  When their performances are merely average, the result sounds more like a filler album cut than a major hit.  Fortunately, Americans in 1986 learned a lesson from Eddie Murphy and Don Johnson.  The public drew a line in the sand:  no more unqualified actors would be allowed to declare themselves pop singers and sneak into the top 10!  At least not until 1987.

My rating:  3 / 10

“All Cried Out” by Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam with Full Force featuring Paul Anthony & Bowlegged Lou (1986, #8)

One person’s view:  “This thing is some real amateur hour shit.” – Nic Renshaw @ Pop Goes the Year

The public’s view:  2.14 / 5.00 or 1.99 / 5.00, depending on the version of the single

Today we consider the legacy of Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam with Full Force featuring Paul Anthony & Bowlegged Lou.  Let’s unpack this musical clown car.  Full Force was a six-man production and songwriting team.  Paul Anthony and Bowlegged Lou were two of Full Force’s members.  Cult Jam sounds like something to spread on toast at a Unification Church breakfast, but it was actually two guys playing instruments without any toast.  Lisa Lisa was a singer, and also the only one of these nine people famous enough to be invited onto TV shows like Origami with the Stars and I’m a Celebrity...Please Pay My Water Bill!  This unwieldy agglomeration normally specialized in freestyle dance music, but they decided one day to make a grandiose, histrionic, nearly five-minute-long break-up ballad.  “All Cried Out” then wept its way onto the airwaves, setting radios on fire with its tears.

I am surprised to learn how poorly Lisa Lisa is viewed by many of today’s armchair ‘80s critics.  She hasn’t achieved Peter Cetera’s feat of unanimous condemnation, but she does get a generous amount of vitriol.  Some of the reactions to her vocals are too cruel for me to quote, even on a blog that usually revels in the bashing of substandard hit music, and “All Cried Out” is her most poorly reviewed hit single.  It has been assailed not just for Lisa’s singing, but for pretty much every aspect of the song and its production.

The reviews like to point out that Full Force did not have much of a history with adult contemporary, and the group couldn’t quite grasp the melodic and lyrical conventions of the genre.  There are apparently some rules to manufacturing this stuff, dag gummit, and “All Cried Out” doesn’t follow them.  It can be contrasted with another break-up ballad from the same year, Patti LaBelle & Michael McDonald’s “On My Own”, which was written and produced by Carole Bayer Sager and Burt Bacharach.  Patti and Michael and Burt and Carole had a thousand times more song-crafting experience than Lisa Lisa’s crew, and they knew that ballads are supposed to color between the lines and not scribble all over the paper.  All the notes in “On My Own” are perfectly placed where the listener expects them to be.  Sophisticates and fancy-pantses swooned over it while turning up their noses at Lisa Lisa.

That being said, “All Cried Out” certainly has a lot more passion than “On My Own” and most of the other slick corporate ballads that topped the charts in 1986.  Lisa Lisa mournfully recounts the carnal joys of the relationship (“My body never knew such pleasure”) while bemoaning the heartbreak of its loss.  There is no such carnal joy in “On My Own”.  We get the impression that the wildest thing Michael McDonald and Patti LaBelle ever did as a couple was to pick out furniture together, and now dividing it up is their most pressing concern.  McDonald complains that it’s like a divorce and they weren’t even married.  Shit.  And “On My Own” was the biggest #1 song of that summer?!  How dismal.

The ex-boyfriend makes an appearance on “All Cried Out”, trying to say that he’s sorry for his woefully neglectful behavior.  Lisa’s response:  “Apology not accepted.”  This is a fun line, suitable for use as a T-shirt slogan.  Good luck finding such a sassy and shirt-worthy lyric in “On My Own” or in the collected works of Peter Cetera.  There is one aspect of this that feels contrived, however:  the ex-boyfriend’s part is actually sung by two different men.  Paul Anthony handles a couple of lines and then Bowlegged Lou waddles up to the plate.  It turns out that Paul and Lou are brothers, and I’m guessing that the unnatural dual arrangement was imposed by their parents to preserve family tranquility.  “Mom, Paul won’t let me sing!”  “Paul, you better let your brother have a turn at the microphone.  Don’t you know he has rickets?”

I’m not going to argue that “All Cried Out” is a flawless masterpiece.  I also can’t defend its cheap video, which implausibly stars a weirdly smooth-skinned cherub as Lisa’s ex.  Nonetheless, I believe the song’s rawness mostly works to its advantage.  If you think it was one of the worst ballads of 1986, then you probably didn’t experience 1986 first-hand.  Or maybe you’re a sophisticate or a fancy-pants.

My rating:  7 / 10

“Friends and Lovers” by Gloria Loring & Carl Anderson (1986, #2)

One person’s view:  “Terrible ballad that hit number two but is justifiably forgotten today.” – DonKarnage @ Rate Your Music

The public’s view:  1.64 / 5.00

I gave a horrendous review to the Phil Collins & Marilyn Martin duet “Separate Lives” on my #1 hits blog, but I admit to having some reluctant admiration for it.  It is a song that sets out to punish the listener and ruin part of his day, and it thoroughly succeeds.  “Friends and Lovers” is a different beast entirely.  It was not the product of an experienced team that consciously decided to rain pestilence down upon the world.  It’s an amateurish endeavor that somehow bumbled its way up the charts, and yet – without even trying – still managed to rival “Separate Lives” as one of the most monumentally annoying ballads of the mid-1980s.

The premise of “Friends and Lovers” is that two people, portrayed by Gloria Loring and Carl Anderson, have been platonic buddies for a long time and now plan to start having sex with each other.  Why didn’t either of them think of this earlier?  Was one of them stuck in another romance until now?  No, there’s nothing that even hints at this.  These two 40-year-olds just happened to look down their pants for the first time in their lives and figured out that there are parts they could be using more effectively.  The song’s bridge would be the ideal place to offer a different explanation, but instead we get such amazing lines as “I’ve been through you, you’ve been through me.”  “Friends and Lovers” was almost certainly the product of a lyricist on a tight deadline.

The track was produced by three individuals, including Carl Anderson himself, and it seems that none of the three ever worked on other pop songs of note.  The instrumentation they devised for “Friends and Lovers” serves only to highlight just how bad the concept and lyrics are, and if I didn’t know better I would think they were mocking the turd they were told to polish.  The dreadfully slow tempo and soft strings heighten the anticipation for drama that never arrives.  The abrupt “buh-bang” after the words “friend” and “lover” is a musical exclamation point that punctuates the couple’s trite declarations as if they have just discovered a relationship principle that no one else knows.  Maybe they should share some other axioms of romance with us.  “Men are from Mars and women are from Venus.  Ta-da!  Give your girlfriend jewelry for her birthday, not office supplies you stole from work.  Sha-boom!”  Every epiphany deserves a sound effect.

When I forced myself to listen to “Friends and Lovers” before writing this entry, I was surprised that the singing was much better than I remembered from those dark days in 1986 when it was all over the radio.  There isn’t a great deal of personality on display, but Loring is capable and Anderson does his best to make something out of this weak material.  The two of them comprise a solid “B” team for an ‘80s duet, as opposed to “A” teams like Patti Austin & James Ingram.  That’s perfect for this scenario, because you wouldn’t want to embarrass one of your “A” teams by having them sing these ridiculous lyrics.

Let’s compare “Friends and Lovers” with its peer “Separate Lives”.  “Separate Lives” finds so many ways to irritate:  the lengthy opening monologue that wastes our time; the barely noticeable melody that leads nowhere; the depressing subject matter made worse by the bitterness, blame, and whining; and the video that doubles down on the most awful things about the song.  It is a true “A” team duet, with both singers fully utilizing their talents, yet the vocal arrangement is engineered to inflict pain.  “Separate Lives” is a masterpiece of calculated malevolence, the musical equivalent of Senator Mitch McConnell.  I find it morbidly fascinating.

“Friends and Lovers” might have matched that level of infamy if everyone had been on board with the mission, but Gloria Loring treated it as a serious work that she thought people might actually like.  Because of the genuine effort that she and Carl Anderson put into their performance, I can’t give it my lowest rating.  In some ways, however, it leaves a less desirable legacy than the few hits that are scored lower.  The screed I’ve posted today is probably the most anyone has written about “Friends and Lovers” – and a good chunk of it focuses on an entirely different record.  Instead of being remembered as something uniquely unpleasant, the song is now barely remembered at all.

My rating:  2 / 10

“Party All the Time” by Eddie Murphy (1985, #2)

One person’s view:  “Although the groove put out by Rick James is solid, the tinker toy synth production sounded cheap (and sounds even worse now), the chorus was annoying, and the worst part was Murphy.  ...  His voice is thin and whiny with barely a trace of any style or skill.” – ArnieNuvo @ PopRedux80

The public’s view:  3.26 / 5.00

The U.S. president for most of the 1980s was an aging actor named Ronald Reagan.  Maybe you’ve heard of him.  He was known more for his communication skills than for his familiarity with the workings of government.  Reagan was the most important person in every White House meeting, but also the one who least understood how to do his job.  His chief of staff, James Baker, was constantly talking to him like he was 6 years old.  “No, Mr. President, you can only veto bills that are passed by Congress.  You can’t veto a Doonesbury comic strip that made fun of you.  And you were supposed to bomb Libya, not Libby’s!  Now who’s going to clean up all of that pumpkin pie filling in Illinois?”

The video for “Party All the Time” takes place in a studio where a famous comedian and actor named Eddie Murphy is recording the song.  He gives off the same type of vibe in this setting as President Reagan did in his cabinet sessions.  Like Reagan, Murphy is the superstar in the room and all eyes are on him.  Also like Reagan, he is out of his element and requires a lot of assistance.

Rick James, who wrote and produced the track, plays the role of chief of staff.  He guides Eddie through the process of making a hit single, even giving him such basic instructions as telling him to put his headphones on.  Rick occasionally contributes a line of vocals into the mix, and as the song nears its end he seems to realize just how dreadful Eddie’s performance has been.  He jumps in with more of his own interjections to salvage the foundering endeavor, just as James Baker did whenever President Reagan proposed investing the Social Security trust fund in Sports Illustrated subscriptions so that every American would get a football-shaped phone.

Eddie Murphy entertained us as the police-car-exhaust-system-vandalizing hero Axel Foley in the Beverly Hills Cop action films.  “Party All the Time” requires him to portray a miserable loser.  The song’s narrator complains that his woman accepts pricey presents from him while going out and screwing other dudes every single night.  He can’t comprehend that she isn’t really his girlfriend – she is just playing him for a fool.  This gullibility is inconsistent with the streetwise persona that Murphy cultivated on the movie screen.  If Axel Foley’s girlfriend went partying without him, the most expensive gift she could expect would be a banana in her tailpipe.  (I should clarify:  in her car’s tailpipe.)

The idea behind “Party All the Time” has the potential to be humorous, and Murphy is ordinarily a very funny guy.  Unfortunately, he performs the song in a nasal monotone without any levity or emotion whatsoever.  He left all of his charisma on a Paramount Pictures backlot and brought none of it into the recording studio.  This is as if Ronald Reagan had decided that his folksy amiability gave him an unfair advantage in politics, so he should deemphasize it by hurling feces at the audience during his campaign speeches.  Eddie Murphy’s music career felt like a similar message to his fans.  “You people expect me to amuse you all day?  Instead I’m going to do this.  You better duck!”

As we shall see, Murphy might not have been the worst actor-turned-singer to have a pop hit in the 1980s.  And “Party All the Time” has a strong enough hook that it retains some appeal regardless of his weaknesses as a vocalist.  Mostly, though, it makes me feel bad for Rick James.  The guy was always told that his songs were too funk-oriented and too explicit to get played on pop radio or MTV, so he never had a top 10 hit on his own.  He scored his biggest single as a producer only by indulging a comedian’s ego trip, helping Murphy briefly become a pop star like a Make-a-Wish kid getting to act out some unrealistic fantasy.  Then Rick had to hear both MC Hammer and Ja Rule sample some of his other works – without permission in one case, and without adding anything worthwhile in the other.  Hammer and Ja had more commercial success with their adaptations than Rick did with his original recordings.

I don’t know what music Rick James listens to in heaven, but for his sake I hope that the radio stations there haven’t played Nicki Minaj’s reworking of “Super Freak” as “Super Freaky Girl”.  Even Ja Rule might be preferable to that.  I do have a pretty good idea of what songs are playing in hell.  I’ll discuss one of them, or maybe even two, in the next entry.

My rating:  4 / 10

“Dancing in the Street” by Mick Jagger & David Bowie (1985, #7)

One news editor’s view:  “... [O]ne of the most irritating and ridiculous singles of its era and truly a low point in the otherwise storied careers of Jagger and Bowie.  Everything about this recording feels phony, phoned in, or coked up, from the sterile ‘80s production to Jagger’s incessant yelps ...” – Jonathan Cohen @ Spin

The public’s view:  2.33 / 5.00

If you were deliberately trying to create a Bad Top Ten Hit, you’d be hard-pressed to come up with a more thorough scheme than the one perpetrated by Mick Jagger and David Bowie.  Their version of “Dancing in the Street” checks most of the boxes that we associate with awfulness.  It’s a superstar duet.  It’s an unnecessary remake of a classic.  It’s white people doing a half-assed imitation of black music.  It’s a charity single that the two men were making for free, so they were unwilling to devote more than a few hours to rehearsing and recording the song and filming the accompanying video.  And wow, Pope Pius on a pretzel, what a video it was.  The next time you forget to change clothes for a Zoom meeting while working from home, you can put your embarrassing faux pas in perspective by remembering when two celebrities willingly made fools of themselves in front of the entire world.  Your Spider-Man pajamas are now famous throughout the company, but at least no one has footage of you maniacally thrusting your face toward Mick Jagger’s gaping mouth.

Like most viewers, I considered Bowie and Jagger’s vaguely amorous tango session to be cringeworthy and repulsive.  Billy Squier’s notorious “Rock Me Tonite” video was almost elegant by comparison.  Whenever “Dancing in the Street” aired on MTV in 1985, I would find any excuse to leave the room until it was over.  However, the intervening four decades of cultural decline have helped soften my opinion of it.  The nausea that this clip once provoked is now replaced by grudging respect for the duo’s improvisation skills.  I even managed to watch it four times while researching this write-up.  I know this sounds like a painful sacrifice for the sake of amateur music criticism, but it doesn’t make me a hero.  Watching the insufferable Phil Collins & Marilyn Martin “Separate Lives” video once while researching my Bad #1 Hits blog is what makes me a hero.

As for the audio portion of this endeavor, “Dancing in the Street” is a fun song and it’s hard to ruin it.  With the same nonexistent budget that the Live Aid organization gave Mick and David’s team, almost any random combination of performers could have made a passable version of the tune.  Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias, for example.  Dionne Warwick and Iron Maiden.  Johnny Rotten, Howdy Doody, and the 90-year-old waitress who always led the happy birthday song at the Chi-Chi’s in Sheboygan.  A rendition by two rock legends like Jagger and Bowie should have been more than just passable, but here we are.

Ultimately, however, it’s a mistake to try to separate the “Dancing in the Street” single from the visual image of two flamboyant egomaniacs strutting around in a derelict London flour mill.  Bowie and Jagger’s vocal stylings on this track are not good, in any sense of that word, but the pair exudes an effortless charisma that few other entertainers can match.  With these two on the roster, this wasn’t merely an annoying, unwanted duet like so many others.  It was an annoying, unwanted event.  Maybe that counts for something.

My rating:  4 / 10

“You’re the Inspiration” by Chicago (1985, #3)

One person’s view:  “This song is quintessential Chicago.  If you wanted to know how lame and dull they and soft rock can be, look to this song.  ...  The piano, the synths, the bass, the percussion, and the strings all sound fake to the point where you question if it was even made by a band and not some overpaid tool in a studio.” – Nerd with an Afro

The public’s view:  2.49 / 5.00

The period from autumn 1982 to autumn 1984 was a glorious time for the Hot 100, as many incredible recording artists were at their peaks and the pop charts were rewarding the highest quality efforts.  The public was showing an unusual amount of good taste and an aptitude for selecting music that would endure for future generations.  Optimism was even floating in the air for the latest Chicago release.  The album’s title conveyed the excitement:  Chicago 17.  Certainly, there wouldn’t be any bland mushiness on this record like there was on Chicago 16 and Chicago XIV.  A prime number meant prime material.

But when “Hard Habit to Break” hit the airwaves as the album’s second single, it reminded everyone that Chicago had mostly abandoned its rock ‘n’ roll origins and had devolved into an adult contemporary act.  “Hard Habit” was a love ballad, albeit an ambitious and unconventional one.  Producer and arranger David Foster threw every trick he knew at it and would later claim that the song was his finest work.  The track included several jarring shifts to its tempo and loudness.  The most unexpected twist was that Peter Cetera’s vocals were intermingled with lines sung by Bill Champlin.  It wasn’t clear whether the two men were supposed to be awkwardly serenading the same woman, or whether they were awkwardly serenading each other.

Although Foster’s slick production kept the tune from being as uninteresting as it might have been, the critics still gave it plenty of flak.  “Hard Habit to Break” is included on all five of the lists of the worst songs of 1984 that I’ve found.  It would have been a shoo-in for an entry here if Chicago’s follow-up single, “You’re the Inspiration”, hadn’t usurped its place as a “bad” hit.

Cetera and Foster originally wrote “You’re the Inspiration” for Kenny Rogers.  The song seemed like a good fit for him.  It was exactly the type of sycophantic Lionel Richie-style love ode that filled Kenny’s swimming pools with caviar while he was riding the lucrative country-pop crossover wave of the early ‘80s.  Surprisingly, though, Rogers wasn’t interested.  He was working with a budding young master of musical excitement named Richard Marx, and Marx could churn out sycophantic Lionel Richie-style love odes just as efficiently as Richie himself.  Rogers picked a couple of Marx’s compositions for his next album and ignored “Inspiration”.  Cetera saw this rejection as a blessing because it allowed him to keep the ballad for his band’s use on Chicago 17.

As with “Hard Habit”, David Foster loaded Chicago’s rendition of “Inspiration” up to the ceiling with gimmicks.  The group’s pre-Foster records had a natural flow to them, like what you might hear from a jam band, but Foster favored a technique known as subito in which a song’s dynamics go through abrupt changes.  This grabbed listeners’ attention at the cost of forcing every transition to be precisely programmed.  His productions sounded synthetic.  The vocals on “Inspiration” also featured double-tracking and echo effects which suggested that Peter Cetera had been cloned repeatedly.  A whole army of him was threatening to engulf us with a shrill falsetto that kept suddenly jumping up and down the scale.  And if the video is telling us the truth, the song didn’t have just one keyboardist.  It had three guys playing keyboards – plus a fourth dude on piano.  Foster had no idea, however, how to use Chicago’s famous horn section on this track.  Saxophonist Walt Parazaider is shown reading the newspaper during the performance.

So does all of this wizardry elevate the song?  Let’s compare it with other works of its kind.  A typical Richie/Marx/Rogers love ballad is like a school cafeteria meatloaf.  You are never happy to see it on your plate, but you understand why it is there.  Chicago’s “You’re the Inspiration” is that same lumpy meatloaf, but don’t you dare call it that.  Now it is an artisanal savory cake of grass-fed Preakness-grade pâté.  It’s delivered to your table on a silver platter, and there’s a little sparkler candle in it and a thin layer of gravy drizzled around it in an ornate spiral.  Oh, and the lunch lady is topless.  The meal is still barely edible, but at least it’s an experience.

We can be thankful that this inherently dull ballad didn’t wind up with Kenny Rogers as was first intended.  He was not the right man to imbue it with the dynamism that it needed.  His singing relied on warmth and subtlety, not flapping his larynx all over the place like Cetera.  Kenny probably thought a subito was something from the value menu at Taco Bell.  I give him credit for turning down the assignment and letting Chicago handle it.  While Cetera’s showboating and Foster’s overproduction may have contributed to the decline of a great band, their studio antics are the best thing about “You’re the Inspiration”.

My rating:  4 / 10