One person’s view: “I don’t know what I dislike more, the slushy-pups lyric, gormlessly simple tune, the godawful children’s chorus but mostly I think it’s the utter waste of Karen Carpenter’s voice on such an undeserving song.” – Lejink @ Rate Your Music
The public’s view: 2.88 / 5.00
When we examine the Bad Top Ten Hits of the early 1970s, we find the germ-laden fingerprints of children all over them. Children were the subjects of questionable hit songs such as “Clair” and “Daddy Don’t You Walk So Fast”. Youngsters, usually those with names like “Donny” or “Marie”, sang on some of the era’s most reviled records. And as if that wasn’t enough, several of the critically disparaged top tens first appeared on kids’ TV shows. This is the lasting legacy of Little Big Time (“Gimme Dat Ding”) and Groovie Goolies (“Chick-A-Boom”), but those two obscure programs must now yield the floor. We’re about to hear from the 800-pound gorilla of children’s television – or, more accurately, the 800-pound yellow ostrich. “Sing” emanated from the land where everything’s A-OK, clouds are swept away like last week’s toenail clippings, and Mr. Hooper has been forced by one deranged blue-furred individual to keep all of his store’s cookies locked up behind the counter with the cigarettes and the condoms. I am of course talking about Sesame Street, which was beamed into billions of kids’ eyeballs every day on PBS.
The debut performance of “Sing” by the Sesame Street cast must have been a fine spectacle, but I can’t find any footage of it to share with you. You’ll just have to imagine Big Bird’s beak opening to its full extent as the notes pour out of it. However, the tune did not go directly from Sesame Street to the pop charts. It first made a stop on an ABC variety special emceed by Marcus Welby, M.D. actor Robert Young and featuring several celebrity guests. The network decided that the show’s subject matter should be based on the host’s name, so they titled it “Robert Young and the Young” and built the entire program around the theme of youth. (Good thing the host wasn’t Dick Butkus.) To drive home the point, they assembled a generic group of children as co-stars.
ABC knew very little about people under the age of 20 who weren’t part of the Partridge Family, and they struggled with how to utilize the kids on Young’s special. They snuck a peek at archrival PBS’s programming for ideas, but overlooked the obvious approach: hiring the host of PBS’s Firing Line, William F. Buckley Jr., to engage the children in a lively discussion of the failures of Keynesian economics. It is unclear why they didn’t do this. Perhaps Buckley demanded that a working model of the Federal Reserve be built for the set, and the network couldn’t afford it. Instead, ABC did the next best thing. They borrowed “Sing” from Sesame Street and asked Laugh-In regular Arte Johnson to lead the little tykes in a sing-along of the tune.
Another of the show’s guests – the Carpenters – was impressed by the song. The duo enthusiastically volunteered to take it into the studio and record a version for all of the people who never watched ABC or PBS. There was a whole demographic who didn’t know how to get to Sesame Street and still hadn’t been subjected to “Sing”. Many of these same individuals didn’t realize that there was a difference between Marcus Welby and Marcus Garvey, at least not until they tried to see the doctor for a sore throat and wound up on a ship to Liberia.
Karen and Richard Carpenter didn’t just believe in “Sing”’s potential to be a hit; they wanted it to be the lead single from their new album. Richard has since remarked that their label wasn’t happy about this, and that “most of our associates thought we were nuts.” He and his sister were correct that their rendition would sell some copies, but it did so by undercutting the song’s premise. The message of “Sing” is that you are supposed to sing even if you stink at it and no one wants to hear you. It’s a simplistic tune that works best in a lackadaisical TV skit with a group of untrained children, a Laugh-In comedian, or a guy in a giant bird suit. Sesame Street proved that “Sing” can even be babbled in Spanish or signed to the deaf, and the lyrics will have just as little significance as they do in English. The only thing that “Sing” isn’t intended for is a slick production featuring one of the best soft rock vocalists of all time. And thus it became perhaps the least admired gold record in the Carpenters’ catalog.
You may think that we’ve hit the nadir of childish hit music of the 1970s. Nothing could be more juvenile than a song from Sesame Street, right? Wrong. Stay tuned.
My rating: 4 / 10
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