“One Good Woman” by Peter Cetera (1988, #4)

One person’s view:  “Peter, like his former band Chicago, was going through some serious Adult Contemporary hell at this time.  A battle for who could write the most bland, slow, soulless corporate music.  There really was no winner in this battle.” – Rocknroll1987 @ Rate Your Music

The public’s view:  2.40 / 5.00

Music bloggers like to tell us that Peter Cetera was the root of all evil.  They claim that he single-handedly ruined Chicago (both the band and the city) and that his yowling is what triggered the Black Monday market crash of ’87.  I think this is an exaggeration, and it overlooks the positives that Cetera brought to the table.  There’s something to be said for having a uniquely odd falsetto that can turn an otherwise bland ballad into a work of humor.  Nonetheless, I struggle to defend his two top ten hits from 1988 and 1989.  I heard “One Good Woman” and his Cher duet “After All” frequently at the time and I don’t recall either one giving me a chuckle.  They mostly just made me rue the life choices that led me to learn of these songs’ existence.  Maybe I should have confined my radio listening to the local hard rock station that stopped adding new music when Zeppelin broke up.

As an uninspired romantic duet written for a romantic movie, “After All” was the more painful of the two singles to endure.  The best I can say about it is that Cher has a nice voice.  She totally outclassed Cetera, just as Amy Grant did when she was paired with him on a previous song.  While it’s tempting to give Cher’s imprudent foray into Ceteraland (or Petersburg?) its own entry here, I’ve decided to spare it the brunt of my sarcasm.  I’ll soon be writing about a different soundtrack duet that was an even more egregious waste of talent than “After All”, and that future post will serve as my warning to the public about the perils of the duet format.  For today’s sermon I have instead chosen to take a closer look at Pete’s last big solo hit “One Good Woman”.

“One Good Woman” is an ode to monogamy.  Cetera has just one good woman, not ten, but the one good woman gives him feeling and fire.  When she’s done with that, she fills him with hope, love, and devotion.  These lyrics are a sweet tribute from a dude to his wife, but the message is undercut by the singer’s fashion choices in the accompanying video.  He looks more like a walking mid-life crisis than a faithful husband.  A 43-year-old man doesn’t typically grow out his hair in a Richard Marx-style mullet and wear a ridiculous button-down vest unless he’s hoping (unrealistically) for college girls to notice how cool he is.  Maybe one of them will propose an “arrangement” in which this groovy grandpa pays her tuition.  At least Cetera wisely chose to forgo his usual earring in this clip.

I like the chorus, which lets me forget for a moment that I am in the midst of a soft rock record.  This chorus kicks some ass.  Unfortunately, the rest of “One Good Woman” is so wimpy that it makes “Ballerina Girl” sound like “Crazy Train”.  The listless instrumentation and Cetera’s groveling, high-pitched tone impart a pathetic quality to the verses when they might otherwise be endearing.  “I am so in love with you, I just can’t deny it” is not the most innovative opening line that a ballad has ever trotted out, but it still could have landed effectively if not delivered at three octaves above a normal vocal range.

Cetera and his co-writer deliberately based a couple of the lyrics on the Tom Hanks movie Big, in the hopes that the song would be picked for the film’s soundtrack.  A pivotal scene in Big involves a “Zoltar” fortune-telling machine at a carnival.  The contraption does more than predict the future; it also somehow grants wishes to those who consult it.  (This carnival is evidently full of surprises.  Maybe the Tilt-a-Whirl gives its riders a free colonoscopy?)  In a nod to Zoltar, the first verse of “One Good Woman” compares the singer’s wife to a fortune teller who can guess whatever he’s going to do next.  She probably knows when he’s about to put on his vest and his earring and cruise the campus bar district in his convertible.

The “fortune teller” line offered only the vaguest allusion to the plot of Big, but Cetera was confident that this would be enough to earn a spot in the film.  He remembered how his romantic ballad “Glory of Love” had been chosen as the theme for The Karate Kid Part II even though he carelessly forgot to include any lyrics about kicking people in the face.  Surprisingly, however, “One Good Woman” did not make the cut for Big.  Director Penny Marshall opted instead for tunes by Billy Idol and Huey Lewis that weren’t written for the movie but which wouldn’t push audiences to the exits.  She would rather have licked the sweat off of Pat Morita’s karate mat than ruin her film with Cetera’s song.

I’m no Zoltar, but I’m going to make a bold prediction about the future:  there will not be any more music by Peter Cetera – or his former band Chicago – on this blog.  I bet this also grants one of your wishes.

My rating:  3 / 10

“Naughty Girls (Need Love Too)” by Samantha Fox (1988, #3)

One person’s view:  “Well, this song is a Hindenburg-level disaster on all fronts.  ...  The percussion sounds like it’s at war with itself, the bass has no presence, and there’s variant sounds that can’t decide on being either the melody or the rhythm.” – Nerd with an Afro

The public’s view:  2.58 / 5.00

British women were simply not very sexy in the 1980s.  I know this sounds like a bigoted stereotype, but you’d agree if you saw the female idols that the U.K. was spewing out into the world.  The most famous Englishwoman of the era was, of course, the beloved humanitarian Princess Di.  She was never the subject of erotic fantasies, unless those fantasies somehow involved a ribbon-cutting ceremony at a hospital for landmine victims.  Scotland was represented by Sheena Easton, who tried way too hard to be a sex symbol but would always be known for her erection-killing duets with Kenny Rogers and Kermit the Frog.  Then there was Margaret Thatcher.  Hardly any teen boys were caught hiding lingerie photos of her between the pages of their math books.  Glamour, intelligence, and Tory grit were in great abundance in the Isles, but sex appeal was in short supply.

That finally changed when Samantha Fox arrived on the music scene in 1987.  Not only was she blatantly sexy, she was almost defiantly British.  Her working-class Cockney accent was what you would expect to hear from a lorry driver hauling crumpets and black pudding on the left side of a motorway in a steady rain.  Even her origin story was uniquely British.  At age 16, the scrappy young Samantha was invited to provide content to a London newspaper.  Her contributions were so relevant and insightful that they appeared all the way up on page 3.  That’s quite an achievement for someone so young.

Maybe I should clarify, though, that British newspapers aren’t known for their high-quality journalism.  One time when I was on a trip to the Kingdom, a paper’s lead story screamed at me in 250-point font that a certain soccer player had cheated on a girlfriend.  It wasn’t even one of the three soccer players who I have heard of:  Lionel Messi, Pelé, or that sporty-looking woman who was in our faces constantly a few years ago.  (I think her name might have been Caitlin?)  The headline was something like “FLAKEY FRANKIE FINDS FLOOZY FOLLOWING FOOTY FLOP”.  A much smaller headline noted that hundreds of people had died in an aviation disaster, with details to be found on page 11.  From this I can deduce that Samantha Fox’s page 3 editorials focused on matters that were more important than mass tragedies but less so than the carousing of athletes.  I’m guessing that she wrote about defiantly British issues like whether her MP should support a council tax on cottaging, or whether the Crown should end the annual stipend of eight sheep to the Earl of Worcestershire that was instituted in 1252.  We’ll never know for sure, because her newspaper ponderings have been lost to the bird cage of time.

Her single “Naughty Girls (Need Love Too)” hasn’t fared much better.  It is considered inferior to her first hit “Touch Me (I Want Your Body)”, and it almost never makes it onto playlists of classic ‘80s songs.  “Naughty Girls” was written and produced by the Full Force studio team, who critics previously blamed for the inadequacies of Lisa Lisa’s “All Cried Out”.  Full Force members Bowlegged Lou and Paul Anthony also made a return appearance on the backing vocals, once again demonstrating that bowlegged people sing exactly like straight-legged people and thus there is no need for both on the same record.  Thankfully, neither Kenny Rogers nor Kermit the Frog was present to interfere with Samantha’s seductive chants.

Fox’s musical persona was that of a woman enthusiastically pursuing her carnal desires without shame.  That may have been a slight step forward for gender equality in the 1980s, but her three big hits “Touch Me”, “Naughty Girls”, and “I Wanna Have Some Fun” are not anthems of female empowerment.  They are mostly just songs about how she completely loses control of herself in the presence of men.  (This is not true at all of the real Samantha Fox, who is married to a woman.)  Not surprisingly, all three tracks were the product of male songwriters.

Although Samantha did a reasonably good job of tickling my teenage hormones back in 1988, her brand of soft-core stimulation now feels as dated as Full Force’s brand of freestyle.  We’re living in the age of Cardi B, Latto, and other confident women whose explicit raps send middle-aged Fox News hosts into shrill tizzy fits.  It’s difficult to be wowed by the male fantasies embodied in “Naughty Girls (Need Love Too)”, even when they are relayed to us by the sexiest woman north of the Chunnel.

My rating:  5 / 10

“I Saw Him Standing There” by Tiffany (1988, #7)

One critic’s view:  “From the synth-dominated arrangement to Tiffany’s over-processed vocals that found her straining, and failing, to give the singer some Joan Jett-style grit, ‘I Saw Him Standing There’ is a total mess.” – Dave Lifton @ Ultimate Classic Rock

The public’s view:  2.12 / 5.00

The hardest part of desecration is choosing an appropriate target.  It’s more difficult than you’d think.  Sandwiches can be wasted but can’t be desecrated.  Bowling tournaments can be spoiled but not desecrated.  Public restrooms are frequently befouled, but they can’t be desecrated – unless perhaps you clog the Sistine Chapel’s toilet with the bones of a saint.  Tiffany, however, knew how to get a sacrilegious job done.  Her remake of “I Saw Her Standing There” has been aptly described by one blogger as “a desecration of a classic Beatles song.”  This should be one of the landmark achievements in the field of Bad Top Ten Hits, but I give it just a half-hearted shrug.  Her blasphemous single is merely a minor speed bump on our ill-advised journey through the depths of the Billboard charts.

Despite my apathy for this particular recording, I must admit that I have a bit of a soft spot for Tiffany.  How could I not?  She is a talented and personable individual, plus she and I share something in common:  we both eat food.  In fact, Tiffany likes food so much that she sells two cookbooks of her favorite recipes.  I thought about purchasing them to find out whether she desecrated any classic dishes, but my shelves are nearly full.  I need to conserve space in case Vince Neil writes a series of flowery romance novels or Gloria Estefan publishes a guide to automobile repair.  I also want to avoid falling into the endless money pit that modern Tiffany fandom has become.  These days, you can’t just listen to Tiff’s music or buy a $40 cookbook – you must live Tiffany and breathe her in through every orifice.  Her author blurb describes how she has infiltrated all aspects of existence:

“Tiffany first expanded her artistry into food during the pandemic with Tiff Takeovers, intimate evenings where fans could taste her cooking and then hear her sing.  That spark evolved into Let’s Food with Tiffany, a cooking club that continues to invite fans into her kitchen and celebrate her Lebanese roots alongside flavors she has collected from years on tour.  She went on to create a Spice Trio:  Rockstar Za’atar, Hip Hop Harissa, and Let’s Taco Taco Taco.  Each is bold, playful, and distinctly Tiffany, giving fans a way to bring her personality to their own tables.  With Poptails, developed in collaboration with celebrity mixologist Rob Floyd, she extended her lifestyle brand into cocktails.  Fans could now mix, sip, and celebrate Tiffany’s flavor beyond the stage.  Beyond food and drink, Tiffany launched Radikal Redz, a boutique of clothing and accessories that captures her fearless, expressive style.  She also created Let’s Zen My Friend, a wellness focused lifestyle community that promotes balance and intentional living.  Each venture reflects a different side of Tiffany’s world, together forming a lifestyle brand that resonates across kitchens, wardrobes, and wellness routines.”

Before she became synonymous with Poptails, Radikal Redz, and Let’s Taco Taco Taco, Tiffany was known mostly for the gravelly growl that she incorporated into her vocals.  Unfortunately, it’s possible to overuse an appealing musical trademark such as this.  Consider another example from the late ‘80s scene:  New Kids on the Block.  Their musical trademark was sucking.  This might have been fine in small portions, but they churned out entire albums and concert tours in which they did little but suck.  It was too much.  Similarly, Tiffany’s normally sultry growl, which was usually deployed sparingly and effectively on only one or two lines per song, turned into more of a pervasive and grating scratchy holler on “I Saw Him Standing There”.  She was supposed to be merrily telling us about a fellow teen who looked way beyond compare, but her technique was more suitable for angrily relating a road rage incident.  “He was just 17, if you know what I mean, and I saw him standing there – right in the middle of the goddamn street.  Not a good place to stand.  His heart went boom, along with the rest of him, when my front bumper made contact at 50 miles an hour.”  It’s a miracle that Tiffany’s heavily stressed larynx didn’t go boom all over the recording studio.

While “I Saw Him Standing There” was not Tiff’s best moment, I respect the enthusiasm that she has shown for it throughout her long career.  She can still perform the tune today in much the same style as she did in her teens, as evidenced by a YouTube clip of her doing so amidst a crowd of middle-aged fans at a casino.  I can’t be too angry that she made an overly energetic – and inferior – cover version of a good song.  It beats making an overly lethargic and inferior cover version of an average song.  Tiffany can desecrate the classics if she wants, and I’ll save my rage for Phil Collins’s boring, slow-paced remake of “A Groovy Kind of Love”.  If Phil ever creates a spice trio his seasonings will make meals taste as bland as possible.  Let’s Porridge Porridge Porridge.

My rating:  5 / 10

“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