One person’s view: “This song steadfastly refuses to stay in my brain once it ends. It’s like the opposite of an earworm – pop music teflon.” – DonKarnage @ Rate Your Music
The public’s view: 2.52 / 5.00
Those of us in Generation X grew up hearing our parents and grandparents tell far-fetched accounts of their childhood woes, like how they had to ride a unicycle up Pike’s Peak in a hurricane every morning to get to school. Today when we lecture our kids and grandkids about our youthful hardships, many of our tales are just as difficult to accept as real. For example, the TV stations in my city would routinely pre-empt beloved network shows with college basketball games or The Billy Graham Crusade. When this occurred, we couldn’t just fire up a streaming service to watch the missed program. Our only option was to fiddle with the antenna to pull in a channel from another town 70 miles away. The video part of the signal would be unusable, but sometimes we’d hear enough of the dialogue to get the gist of the plot. (“I think Arnold just asked Willis what he’s talking about.”) We’d have just one more chance to catch the episode during the summer re-runs – when it was apt to be pre-empted by baseball – before it was lost to the ages.
This is a factual story, but kids scoff at the absurdity of it. The anti-renaissance that music fans experienced in the early 1980s is another historic event that prompts similar levels of skepticism. This so-called “doldrums” period (which I’ve already mentioned on my Bad #1 Hits blog) was a time in which radio casually dismissed much of the rock and new wave music that would ultimately define the decade, and instead drilled us with lame ballads over and over again. Much like cancelling an episode of a top-rated sitcom for religious programming, the ‘80s doldrums seems too pointless, malicious, and self-defeating for anyone to believe it actually happened. “Grandpa, is it really true that almost every radio station in the country simultaneously decided to hit itself in the crotch with a mop handle? And then ten years later they did it again, but this time they used a mop handle with spikes on it? By the way, what was a ‘radio station’?”
Whenever people bemoan the wimpy music that accompanied the 1980s doldrums, they always single out Air Supply for ridicule and contempt. Lionel Richie and Neil Diamond fare little better, and even Christopher Cross is sometimes thrown under the lions or fed to the bus. But one of the horsemen of the adult contemporary apocalypse is given a pass: Kenny Rogers. I know Kenny had a great voice and that he left us with many classic songs and some delicious roasted chicken, but even his legendary performance on “The Gambler” can’t shield him from scrutiny forever. He scored eight top tens between 1979 and 1983, and six of those earned mediocre Rate Your Music scores under 2.70. It’s finally time to decorate Kenny’s life with an entry on the Bad Top Ten Hits blog.
You may be thinking that “We’ve Got Tonight” is the Kenny Rogers hit that deserves to be dismantled here. Bob Seger wrote and recorded the definitive rendition of this song, and there was no need for a remake just five years later when his original was still getting airplay. This did not deter Kenny, who conspired with Sheena Easton to churn out a cover version. Easton’s quixotic ambition was to make at least one song for each radio format, in the same way that other people might set a goal of eating one of every species of penguin. She achieved quite a bit of progress toward her musical mission in the 1980s, though she didn’t eat any penguins that I know of. Her patriarchal anthem “Morning Train (9 to 5)” hit #1 at both pop and AC, and her collaborations with Prince made a splash on the R&B and dance charts. I wish I were joking about this, but the genre-hopping Scottish lass even recorded a Spanish language album and won a Grammy for Best Mexican-American Performance. (Sheena Easton: the Selena of Glasgow.) Her duet with Kenny Rogers allowed Easton to check off the country music item on her bucket list. She probably also traded some marriage tips with the elder statesman. The two singers would eventually rack up four divorces apiece.
“We’ve Got Tonight” is the lowest rated top ten for either Kenny or Sheena, but we need to keep in mind that it was a 1980s superstar duet. This category was rife with disappointment, and this blog will already be covering several very bad superstar duets in the near future. We must grade them on a curve, just as we do with novelty tunes and teeny-bopper records, or else we will be discussing little else from the decade. For Kenny’s entry, I’ve instead decided to spotlight his solo hit “I Don’t Need You”. It’s one of his most pleasureless singles and I was surprised to see that it had reached #3 on the Hot 100. It peaked in the same week that Lionel Richie and Diana Ross settled in at #1 for a 9-week stay with “Endless Love”. I consider that exact moment to be the nadir of the ‘80s doldrums.
“I Don’t Need You” is a boring song with a boring tempo and boring instrumentation. The title lyric’s negative sentiment is the only thing that keeps us listening past the first 20 seconds, because we think for a moment that Rogers is finally going to tell a woman to go to hell. He’s done being her knight in shining armor! This hope is shattered as “I Don’t Need You” slowly reveals itself to be another love ballad like a million others. I do, however, like the line “I don’t need children in my old age.” I wonder if Kenny was reminded of that lyric at age 65 when his fifth wife told him that she was pregnant with twins. It’s more likely that he had forgotten the song completely by then, like everybody else did.
Kenny’s singing was good even when the material wasn’t, but it’s too bad that his dullest music yielded some of his biggest crossover success. It was all part of the doldrums, I guess. We’ll delve deeper into this sinister period of pop music history, and into the reputation of the era’s most notorious band, in the next entry.
My rating: 3 / 10