“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