“When the Children Cry” by White Lion (1989, #3)

One person’s view:  “‘Grunge killed hair metal!’  No, it didn’t.  Shit like this did.” – TheBigWhatever @ Reddit

The public’s view:  2.18 / 5.00

Hair metal.  The phrase evokes memories of a happier time when the sweet scent of freedom wafted through the air.  Although hair metal is easy to mock, it has endured longer than most of the other music of the late 1980s.  Miami freestyle and sophisti-pop came and went, and Stock-Aitken-Waterman survives only through Rickrolling, but grandmas everywhere are still banging their heads to “Pour Some Sugar on Me”.  Nonetheless, the Danish-American hair band White Lion – which once played stadiums and sold millions of records – has not withstood the test of time.  Its primary Facebook fan page has dwindled to only 3,100 followers.  You are now 33 times more likely to encounter an endangered Bornean orangutan than you are to meet a White Lion fan.

White Lion doesn’t deserve its decline into obscurity.  Vito Bratta’s guitar skills were universally praised and Mike Tramp’s singing drew comparisons to Jon Bon Jovi (though not always positive comparisons).  All four members had hair worthy of a Silkience commercial, and in Tramp’s case, at least, that hair was layered on top of a powerful brain that could assemble thought-provoking lyrics.  While the group’s peers were making music for strip clubs, White Lion was pontificating on social problems.  Its biggest single, “When the Children Cry”, asked metalheads to stifle their partying for a few minutes and feign concern for the weighty issue of worldwide governance.

“When the Children Cry” proposes that all national boundaries be erased in a quest for unity and peace.  It’s the hard rock equivalent of “Imagine”, but with little of the optimism that John Lennon brought to the endeavor.  White Lion depicts the planet as a war-ravaged wasteland that will require a Herculean rebuilding effort by the next generation.  Children are expected to somehow create a conflict-free utopia out of the ashes that their elders have left behind, right after they clean their rooms and do their homework and dry their crying eyes.  No pressure.

You would never know it from the bleak imagery, but the song was released in the glasnost era in which peace was actually breaking out all over.  Reagan and Gorbachev had long ago dropped their angry rhetoric and were exchanging love letters.  More importantly, the Rock-and-Roller Cola Wars were finally cooling off after several years of violence.  Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson agreed to amicably mediate their beverage differences and disarm the nuclear missiles that they had pointed at each other.  White Lion doesn’t acknowledge these promising developments and the negotiators who brought them about.  The band prefers to invest its hopes in the “little child” to whom the lyrics are addressed, but we have since discovered that the kids born in the 1980s are neither wiser nor more ethical than their parents and grandparents.  I have yet to hear of anyone from that cohort becoming a great diplomat or humanitarian.  The most capable millennials have instead dedicated their talents to Silicon Valley grifts and financial engineering schemes.  The young lad (or lass) in the song probably grew up to launch a meme coin or create a dating app for white supremacists.  He never had any interest in ending a cola war, as long as he wasn’t drafted to fight in it.

The most memorable line in “When the Children Cry” takes direct aim at the U.S. Constitution:  “No more presidents.”  Mike Tramp has said that he was thinking specifically of Ronald Reagan when he wrote this lyric.  While I have made fun of Reagan many times myself, I question whether his presidency was disastrous enough to justify dismantling our entire republic.  There was only so much damage that one befuddled old man could do to the country.  (It isn’t like the American people would ever be stupid enough to vote for two senile octogenarians in a row.)  Instead of just waiting out Reagan for another few months, White Lion implied that we should subjugate ourselves to an unelected global cabal of children.  The solution seemed worse than the problem.  If your elderly doctor started babbling about putting lasers in outer space to burn off that suspicious growth on your neck, you would quietly seek a second opinion.  You wouldn’t blow up the hospital where he works and then hire a 9-year-old neighbor to give you a pocketknife surgery in his tree house.

“When the Children Cry” lands a little differently now that the world is finally becoming the hellscape that White Lion described.  Maybe Mike Tramp was ahead of his time in some ways.  However, the song’s expectations for the future sound just as naïve as ever.  Does anyone think that the kids who lean on ChatGPT for every challenge will someday be capable of reopening the Strait of Hormuz or repairing the toxic U.S.-Canadian relationship?  If you would like to immerse yourself in the politics (and snazzy guitar work) of White Lion, I instead recommend the pro-Greenpeace anthem “Little Fighter”.  And if you’re going to a “No Kings” rally, I suggest leaving your “No More Presidents” sign at home.

My rating:  4 / 10

“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

“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