One person’s view: “[W]ith the over-sanitised backing from a skittish-sounding guitar and what sound suspiciously like programmed drums, it has the air of toffs slumming it downtown rather than the real street romance the Ad-libs evoked so joyously.” – Lejink @ Rate Your Music
The public’s view: 2.38 / 5.00
Let’s stand and face the flag as we solemnly reminisce about a beloved American singing group that proudly incorporated its hometown into its name. This ensemble’s peak moment arrived in 1981 after it had been performing together for many years. By remaking a forgotten tune from the mid-1960s, the group was finally allowed to taste the dewy air near the top of Billboard’s Hot 100.
This song’s lead melody was quite catchy, but it was the backing singers that really made it stand out. One of the singers was blessed with a voice deep enough to damage nearby infrastructure each time he cleared his throat. The public loved his bass vocal parts, and the group’s remake became one of the major hits of the summer. Unfortunately, it was one of those songs like “Achy Breaky Heart” or “Dance Monkey” that held up about as well as a Jim Cramer stock market prediction. Everyone got thoroughly sick of it and it had to be removed from Pizza Hut jukeboxes to keep unruly children from playing it as ragebait. Today it is almost never heard on ‘80s oldies stations, and it possesses one of the lowest Rate Your Music scores of any top 10 hit of its time.
This is, of course, the story of the Oak Ridge Boys and their most famous song, “Elvira”. Now that you mention it, though, everything I said also applies to a different vocal ensemble and their most famous song. Most people haven’t thought about the Manhattan Transfer in eons, but they will be the focus of today’s entry in the Bad Top Ten Hits Hall of Fame.
Before the Manhattan Transfer revived it in 1981, “The Boy from New York City” was a rarely heard oldie by a doo-wop group called the Ad Libs. The “Boy” in the lyrics excels at life by every metric, most importantly wealth. He has one of the finest penthouses in NYC, pockets full of spending loot, and even a brand new car. (The song doesn’t say anything about owning a parking spot, so I suppose he has to leave the car at a garage in White Plains. The Boy ain’t a trillionaire.) He’s also cute, sweet, romantic, and a good dancer. He’s the kind of goody two-shoes who you want to pick up by the belt and throw headfirst into a cart full of medical waste. The Transfer understood that he came across as a nepo-baby wuss, so they toughened him up in their remake by adding a mention of his “dueling scar”. Now he is a strange amalgam of moneyed culture and street violence, like if Michael Bloomberg joined the Latin Kings.
“The Boy from New York City” is mostly well-written, but I am baffled by the way the first verse starts: “He’s kind of tall / He’s really fine / Some day I hope to make him mine, all mine.” The lyrics are tyrannically obsessive about rhyming, to the point that the narrator is named Kitty so that she rhymes with “city”. And yet, “tall” stubbornly refuses to rhyme with “fine”. Many rhymes would have worked well for that first line: “He’s six-foot-nine.” “He makes bathtub wine.” “He’s quite benign.” The songwriters chose none of them. Maybe they deserve credit for tearing up the rulebook, but this glaring deviation from the rhyme scheme sticks in the craw. Simple pop songs aren’t supposed to trigger my OCD.
The bad reviews of this record do not mention the rhyme foul-up, instead criticizing the Transfer’s overly clean, whitewashed sound. This act always seemed a little too high-class to merit a place on pop radio. Manhattan Transfer concerts were staid black-tie affairs, with none of the rioting and public nudity that you might see at, say, an Oak Ridge Boys show. Behind the scenes, however, the quartet were rock-and-roll hell-raisers. Janis Siegel, the lead singer on “Boy from New York City”, once even put a pig’s head in a hotel toilet as a prank. The Manhattan Transfer was every kosher plumber’s worst nightmare.
I personally can’t complain about the group’s performance on “Boy from New York City”. For me, this crazy Sesame Street-sounding song was a fun distraction that helped make America’s soft rock misadventure of 1981 more bearable. I was always secretly delighted when it interrupted the never-ending sequence of boring ballads on my parents’ radio, though I’d rarely hear it all the way through before someone changed the station. If I must find fault with something, it would be the frequent “yeah” noises that are emitted by bass singer Tim Hauser in response to Janis Siegel’s assertions about The Boy. Hauser sounds like he’s auditioning for a Pepto-Bismol commercial, trying out for the role of Man Who Just Ate Three Burritos And Is Dismayed To Find A Pig’s Head Blocking The Toilet. One or two of these groaning interjections would have been enough to get the point across. They didn’t need to be repeated in every verse.
My rating: 7 / 10
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