“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