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
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