“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

“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

“To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before” by Julio Iglesias & Willie Nelson (1984, #5)

One person’s view:  “The pairing of Iglesias and Nelson was absurd...  ...  Loaded with accents and vibrato, it was unbelievably ear shattering.  ...  Excluding novelty songs and strange one-hit wonder stuff, I would have to rank this as one of the absolute worst hits of the decade (and probably beyond).” – ArnieNuvo @ PopRedux80

The public’s view:  1.71 / 5.00

When the Joe Cocker & Jennifer Warnes duet “Up Where We Belong” was released in 1982, many radio DJs thought that Island Records was pranking them.  Cocker’s alcohol-laden croak was such a harsh mismatch to Warnes’s willowy vocal that no one believed the two singers had been intentionally paired together.  Plus, the lyrics were ludicrous.  Some stations shipped their copies back to the label to ensure that they didn’t accidentally play the tune over the air.  It wasn’t until the success of the associated movie, An Officer and a Gentleman, that the ballad was taken seriously.  “Up Where We Belong” ultimately went to the very top of the charts – where the eagles cry on a mountain high.  No one publicly admitted that it had been a joke, but the people involved in making the record were later seen laughing all the way to the bank.  Except for Joe Cocker, who vomited all the way to the bank.

For those radio programmers who remembered being Cockered and Warned, it must have been déjà vu when “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before” showed up in the mailroom.  Now this had to be a prank.  There was essentially no overlap in the fan bases of Julio Iglesias and Willie Nelson, and nobody was asking to hear them on the same record.  The duo even looked preposterous together.  Julio always wore a tux everywhere in case someone asked him to emcee the Oscars on a moment’s notice.  Willie would be standing right next to him, dressed like he was about to head out to the barn to slop the pigs.  Their collaboration was a classic case of what I call a “hot fudge crabcake”:  two items that are perfectly good on their own, combined in a way that ruins both.

The first time I heard “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before” was when it made its debut on Casey Kasem’s American Top 40.  The twelfth time I heard it was on its twelfth and final appearance on AT40, eleven weeks later.  I never encountered it anywhere else.  The pop and rock stations didn’t play it.  My parents’ Soft and Lite and Warm and Wimpy stations didn’t play it.  MTV never aired a video for it nor held a contest in which a lucky viewer could win Willie’s childhood outhouse.  None of that stopped Nelson and Iglesias from hanging out in the top 10 with Cyndi Lauper, Lionel Richie, and Kenny Loggins.  It was weird at the time and is still weird.

One day I snuck a peek at a Billboard at Waldenbooks, and noticed that the Hot 100 listing for “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before” was now accompanied by a solid-filled circle.  This was the universally recognized symbol for an RIAA gold certification.  I was incredulous.  Today the RIAA generously gives away gold and platinum awards like a rib joint hands out extra napkins, but in 1984 a gold single was a big flappin’ deal.  It meant that one million copies of the 45 RPM disc had been shipped to record stores and presumably sold.  Most of the time a record needed to hit #1 or #2 to have a chance at being certified gold, but Julio and Willie had done the near-impossible.  They sold a million singles without the support of radio or MTV, and they did it without appealing to the usual single-buying demographic of teenagers.  The main reason to purchase “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before” was to keep it as a collectible.  The record was a curiosity, a 1980s pop culture mistake that would someday be good for a laugh.  It belonged in a climate-controlled room with a Pittsburgh Maulers USFL jersey, an unopened case of New Coke, and a Mary Decker action figure that blames a nearby Cabbage Patch doll every time it falls off the shelf.  It didn’t belong on a turntable.

Now that I am even older than Willie and Julio were in 1984, I thought that revisiting their duet might yield a new appreciation for it.  It did not.  Both men are excellent singers, to be sure, but that only makes the endeavor more painfully embarrassing.  If I have to hear two geezers wistfully recalling their thousands of one-night stands, I want the proceedings to be jocular rather than sincere.  “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before” would work better as a locker room brag than it does as a corny ballad.

Whatever you think of this song, it does contain one truthful observation:  the winds of change are always blowing.  Those winds carried Willie away, along with Kenny, Dolly, and all of the other country acts that had crossed over to the Hot 100 in the first half of the 1980s.  Country singers were effectively banished from the pop chart for many years to come, and it was probably the fault of “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before”.

My rating:  1 / 10

“Mr. Roboto” by Styx (1983, #3)

One critic’s view:  “‘Mr. Roboto’ offers glib paradoxes about technology in a hackneyed techno-pop style that borrows science fiction sound effects from the Alan Parsons Project.  ...  While one wants to applaud Styx for their good-heartedness, again and again one is brought up short by the shallow derivativeness of their music and the awkwardness of their lyrics.” – Stephen Holden @ New York Times, “Serious Issues Underlie a New Album from Styx”, Mar. 27, 1983

The public’s view:  2.65 / 5.00

The early 1980s was the heyday of the Moral Majority, a conservative political group headed by a televangelist named Jerry Falwell.  The Moral Majority is one of the two most misnamed things ever invented, the other being Grape-Nuts cereal.  Just as Grape-Nuts contains neither grapes nor nuts, the Moral Majority was not moral and it represented the interests of only 5 or 10 percent of the population.  Actually, Grape-Nuts would have been a slightly more accurate name for Falwell’s organization.  There were no grapes in that wacky Virginia vineyard, but there were plenty of nuts.

Falwell and similar agitators often competed for attention by making unfounded attacks on rock music, with the more ridiculous the charge the better.  A few of the evangelists went too far when they alleged that Styx’s anti-drug track “Snowblind” included a Satanic message that could be revealed by playing the record backwards.  Some acts would have embraced and monetized the false accusation by adopting a lucrative new image as devil-worshippers, starting by sacrificing their fans on stage and drinking their blood.  (It’s too bad no one found any occult references in “You and I”, because I would have loved to see Eddie Rabbitt and Crystal Gayle try this tactic.)  Ritual human sacrifice conflicted with Styx singer Dennis DeYoung’s devout Christian beliefs, however, so the band chose not to pursue this approach.  Instead they retaliated with a concept album, Kilroy Was Here, that depicted a music-hating cult which had taken over the world.  This unflattering caricature of the Moral Majority was a solid foundation for the record, but DeYoung decided that the project needed more than that.  It needed robots.

Robots have always been a favorite science fiction motif, but in other genres in Kilroy’s era they were usually a symptom of writer’s block.  When it was time to make the 92nd episode of Benson or the 3rd sequel to Rocky, and the idea mill was running on fumes, a robot could be tossed into the screenplay to shake things up.  It was the last plot device to try before deploying an even more desperate trope like Benson getting amnesia, or Apollo Creed somehow accidentally switching bodies with Paulie before an important fight.  Robots were also able to get away with stuff that would be controversial if human characters did it.  Evangelical groups bitched about everything 24 hours a day, but they never threatened to boycott Star Wars over the same-sex relationship between C3PO and R2D2.

Although DeYoung was traveling down a well-worn path with his embrace of robots, there were logistical issues to overcome.  It would take a 600-page novel to fully explain why an army of Japanese androids had allied itself with a record-burning preacher in the dystopian future.  But Styx was making an album of nine songs, at least one of which was required to be a groaner love ballad to keep radio programmers happy.  How was the band going to tell such a complex tale under these constraints?

As usual, DeYoung thought he had the answer.  He decreed that Styx would star in a 10-minute pre-concert movie to introduce the implausible robot-and-preacher-infested milieu, and then act out the remainder of the story on stage.  The other band members had no thespian ambitions, however, and went along with this without enthusiasm.  Tommy Shaw grimaced his way through the performances as if he was being forced to give his grandfather a pedicure.  He would later describe, with a measure of satisfaction, fans rushing to the exits when subjected to DeYoung’s sci-fi meanderings during the band’s headlining set at a festival.

The first single from Kilroy Was Here was “Mr. Roboto”.  Those who had seen the stage act knew that this song described the pivotal plot moment in which the outlawed rock star escapes from the cult’s prison by disguising himself as one of the robot guards.  These informed fans were few in number, unfortunately, because DeYoung had insisted on starting the Kilroy tour in intimate venues where his vision could be fully realized.  Instead of selling out stadiums like they usually did, his band was playing to small crowds in community theaters and school gymnasiums.  You couldn’t plan a birthday party for your cat without worrying that Styx might show up with their 10-minute movie and their silly robot costumes.  Meanwhile the general public remained blissfully unaware of the Kilroy story, and most incorrectly believed that “Mr. Roboto” was some sort of protest against technology.  Or maybe it was an ode of praise for technology – DeYoung does keep thanking the robot, after all.  Either way, the gimmicky storyline and self-indulgent tour obscured the album’s anti-censorship message and earned Styx decades of ridicule.

All of this makes “Mr. Roboto” sound like a total fiasco.  Today, however, it is seen primarily as a charming piece of musical nostalgia like other quirky 1983 hits such as “She Blinded Me with Science” and “Puttin’ On the Ritz”.  Although Dennis DeYoung may have taken himself way too seriously, he at least put a semi-original thought or two into this song.  That’s more than we can say for a couple of the other records I’ve discussed here recently.

My rating:  6 / 10

“You and I” by Eddie Rabbitt & Crystal Gayle (1983, #7)

One person’s view:  “A cynical, calculated attempt to fashion a country analogue of Lionel Richie and Diana Ross’ mind-numbing blockbuster Endless Love.” – gasp65 @ Rate Your Music

The public’s view:  2.43 / 5.00

“You and I” raged across America at the start of my teen years, and it immediately became my least favorite single by either Eddie Rabbitt or Crystal Gayle.  Love ballads such as this were impossible to appreciate when I had never fallen in love and had no immediate likelihood of doing so.  However, I believed that after weathering a relationship or two, I might someday learn to enjoy – or at least tolerate – songs of this ilk.

It was the same misplaced sense of optimism that I had about the dreaded chore of buying new shoes.  Shoe shopping was always a lengthy ordeal that required trying on ten pairs to find the right size.  Making matters worse, my Catholic school’s bizarre dress code forced me to purchase additional shoes that were too ugly and uncomfortable to be worn in any non-school setting.  I longed for the day, not far off, when my foot size would stabilize at an adult level and the shoe-buying process would be much more efficient.  I also assumed that science would disprove Catholicism by that time, thereby nullifying the dress code.  I’d be able to grab any 10½-wide pair of men’s sneakers and be out of the store in two minutes.

Although scientists eventually came through for us on Catholicism, I continue to be disenchanted by today’s footwear experience.  My feet may have stopped growing, but it matters little when sneaker sizes are inconsistent across models and the best-fitting ones are never in stock anyway.  Quality control has also gone AWOL, so left shoes and right shoes from the same pair now usually differ by half a centimeter in every dimension.  Picking out shoes sucks as much as it ever did.  You know what else still sucks like it did when I was 13?  Listening to “You and I”.

Eddie Rabbitt and Crystal Gayle were good country & western singers, but there isn’t much country or western in “You and I”.  It’s a generic adult contemporary product with a mediocre arrangement.  Gayle has such a beautiful voice, and sadly the only time we get to hear it in isolation is when she’s echoing one of Rabbitt’s lines.  She’s relegated to the role of a parrot.  I also don’t care for the structure of the song.  The bridge is sung twice in identical fashion, so if you tune in during this part you can’t tell whether it’s the first or second occurrence.  This makes it hard to decide whether to change the station or tough it out.  After the second bridge, the song ends with the singers smugly congratulating themselves.  “We made it, you and I.”  Hey, I’m the one who just endured four minutes of deprivation and auditory hardship.  Where’s my praise?

There is one setting where “You and I” makes perfect sense:  weddings.  It’s a lovely ballad for the first slow dance between the newly married couple.  You know, that moment during the reception when everyone is distracted and you can sneak over to the cake and lick all the frosting off.  Unfortunately, wedding songs and funeral songs quickly wear out their welcome in other contexts.  (This phenomenon was later recognized as Midler’s Law.)  I remember an FM station in the ‘80s whose announcers constantly touted all the places where we could listen:  “At home, at work, at school, and in your car.”  Not once did they suggest tuning in to their broadcast at your wedding to save money on a DJ.  And yet, “You and I” was inexplicably all over the radio and on the charts for what seemed like forever.

In late winter it was clear that “You and I” had finally stalled out at #7 on the Hot 100 and was about to begin its highly awaited descent.  But just as the embattled populace was breathing a sigh of relief, Kenny Rogers & Sheena Easton’s squawking remake of Bob Seger’s “We’ve Got Tonite” leapt into the top 10 right behind Eddie & Crystal.  This was like Punxsutawney Phil seeing his shadow and announcing that there will be six more weeks of bitter cold, and also that he will continue shitting on your porch for the duration of it because he doesn’t like getting snow on his bottom.

Aside from being fouled by these two tedious duets, the Hot 100 enjoyed one of its best years in history in 1983.  Almost every song to make the top 10 was a keeper – even the “bad” one that will be discussed next.

My rating:  3 / 10

“The Girl Is Mine” by Michael Jackson & Paul McCartney (1983, #2)

One person’s view:  “Two of the greatest music artists of all time took the biggest dump on the biggest album of all time!  Uggh, this song makes me want to rip my ears off and rip all the skin off my face!” – Paul Stroessner @ Return to the 80s

The public’s view:  2.76 / 5.00

Superstar duets have been around since the time of Sodom & Gomorrah, but they took a dark turn in the 1980s.  Duets were no longer serendipitous pairings of people who decided to sing together after a chance run-in at an awards ceremony or an AA meeting.  Now they were carefully scripted events whose participants were matched to one another by record label accountants based on their appeal to the targeted demographics.  Sometimes the duet was tied to the cross-merchandising of a movie, in the same way that Burger King might have served your drink in a collectible Return of the Jedi glass or sprinkled horsefly wings on your sandwich to promote The Fly.  The songs chosen for superstar duets were often the weakest available to either performer, in the belief that putting two big names on the same record would be enough to overcome the poor quality and sell a lot of copies.  All too frequently, this proved to be a valid assumption.

“The Girl Is Mine” is a notable example of a bad superstar duet, and it is frequently cited as a marketing faux pas.  What idiot at Epic Records decided to release Thriller’s worst song as its first single?  After looking into this maneuver, however, I think it was actually a stroke of genius and that it contributed to the album’s blockbusting sales.  “The Girl Is Mine” may have been wimpy and childish, but it accomplished several goals for Michael Jackson.  It reminded pop and adult contemporary radio stations that he wasn’t just an R&B or dance act.  It softened up the stodgier media outlets for his forthcoming singles about paternity suits and street gangs.  (Remember, radio had just come out of the doldrums and there was still some lingering conservatism.)  It also put him on the path to being named the King of Pop.  Let me explain this last one.

If you want to become the king of something but you aren’t in the line of succession, your best hope is to depose the current king.  In 1982, nobody was more respected than Paul McCartney.  He was the de facto King of Pop, even if no one ever addressed him that way and he didn’t walk around wearing a crown.  But Michael Jackson sensed that King Paul’s rule over his dominion was imperiled.  It was one thing to spend the last decade making silly love songs, but a silly anti-racism song like “Ebony and Ivory” suggested that McCartney was finally way out of his depth.  Now Jackson had the opportunity to write a song that the two of them would perform together.  This gave rise to the following multi-year scheme:

1.  Force Paul to sing Michael’s juvenile lyrics along with him on “The Girl Is Mine”, adding to the narrative that Paul had become a lightweight.

2.  Follow up the duet with some kick-ass solo songs, so that people can see how much better MJ is without a goofy has-been like McCartney weighing him down.

3.  Use the profits from Thriller to outbid Paul for the publishing rights to the Beatles catalog.

4.  Send Paul a bill every time he performs one of his own old songs.

5.  License Beatles tunes for use in commercials.  Paul stops watching TV, fearing that he will see a Tinactin ad with the jingle “Yesterday / All my jock itch finally went away...”

6.  Declare himself the new King of Pop, even as McCartney fumes that he’s still alive and is still making plenty of great pop music in the 1980s.  Doesn’t the theme to Spies Like Us count for anything?

7.  Marry into the royal family of the other singer who had been called The King.  Winner, winner, vegetarian dinner.

Although “The Girl Is Mine” ultimately led to phenomenal success for Jackson, its artistic merit is mixed.  It has two world-class singers performing at a high level, plus decent studio work from the guys in Toto, but it also sounds like an argument between a couple of first-graders.  “You’re a poohead, Paul.”  “Am not.”  “Are too.”  “Takes one to know one.”  “When I get rich I’m going to buy something you want and ruin it.”  “I hope your nose falls off someday, Michael.”  In the days before Tupac and Biggie, this was the best we could hope for in a musical feud.

My rating:  4 / 10