“One Good Woman” by Peter Cetera (1988, #4)

One person’s view:  “Peter, like his former band Chicago, was going through some serious Adult Contemporary hell at this time.  A battle for who could write the most bland, slow, soulless corporate music.  There really was no winner in this battle.” – Rocknroll1987 @ Rate Your Music

The public’s view:  2.40 / 5.00

Music bloggers like to tell us that Peter Cetera was the root of all evil.  They claim that he single-handedly ruined Chicago (both the band and the city) and that his yowling is what triggered the Black Monday market crash of ’87.  I think this is an exaggeration, and it overlooks the positives that Cetera brought to the table.  There’s something to be said for having a uniquely odd falsetto that can turn an otherwise bland ballad into a work of humor.  Nonetheless, I struggle to defend his two top ten hits from 1988 and 1989.  I heard “One Good Woman” and his Cher duet “After All” frequently at the time and I don’t recall either one giving me a chuckle.  They mostly just made me rue the life choices that led me to learn of these songs’ existence.  Maybe I should have confined my radio listening to the local hard rock station that stopped adding new music when Zeppelin broke up.

As an uninspired romantic duet written for a romantic movie, “After All” was the more painful of the two singles to endure.  The best I can say about it is that Cher has a nice voice.  She totally outclassed Cetera, just as Amy Grant did when she was paired with him on a previous song.  While it’s tempting to give Cher’s imprudent foray into Ceteraland (or Petersburg?) its own entry here, I’ve decided to spare it the brunt of my sarcasm.  I’ll soon be writing about a different soundtrack duet that was an even more egregious waste of talent than “After All”, and that future post will serve as my warning to the public about the perils of the duet format.  For today’s sermon I have instead chosen to take a closer look at Pete’s last big solo hit “One Good Woman”.

“One Good Woman” is an ode to monogamy.  Cetera has just one good woman, not ten, but the one good woman gives him feeling and fire.  When she’s done with that, she fills him with hope, love, and devotion.  These lyrics are a sweet tribute from a dude to his wife, but the message is undercut by the singer’s fashion choices in the accompanying video.  He looks more like a walking mid-life crisis than a faithful husband.  A 43-year-old man doesn’t typically grow out his hair in a Richard Marx-style mullet and wear a ridiculous button-down vest unless he’s hoping (unrealistically) for college girls to notice how cool he is.  Maybe one of them will propose an “arrangement” in which this groovy grandpa pays her tuition.  At least Cetera wisely chose to forgo his usual earring in this clip.

I like the chorus, which lets me forget for a moment that I am in the midst of a soft rock record.  This chorus kicks some ass.  Unfortunately, the rest of “One Good Woman” is so wimpy that it makes “Ballerina Girl” sound like “Crazy Train”.  The listless instrumentation and Cetera’s groveling, high-pitched tone impart a pathetic quality to the verses when they might otherwise be endearing.  “I am so in love with you, I just can’t deny it” is not the most innovative opening line that a ballad has ever trotted out, but it still could have landed effectively if not delivered at three octaves above a normal vocal range.

Cetera and his co-writer deliberately based a couple of the lyrics on the Tom Hanks movie Big, in the hopes that the song would be picked for the film’s soundtrack.  A pivotal scene in Big involves a “Zoltar” fortune-telling machine at a carnival.  The contraption does more than predict the future; it also somehow grants wishes to those who consult it.  (This carnival is evidently full of surprises.  Maybe the Tilt-a-Whirl gives its riders a free colonoscopy?)  In a nod to Zoltar, the first verse of “One Good Woman” compares the singer’s wife to a fortune teller who can guess whatever he’s going to do next.  She probably knows when he’s about to put on his vest and his earring and cruise the campus bar district in his convertible.

The “fortune teller” line offered only the vaguest allusion to the plot of Big, but Cetera was confident that this would be enough to earn a spot in the film.  He remembered how his romantic ballad “Glory of Love” had been chosen as the theme for The Karate Kid Part II even though he carelessly forgot to include any lyrics about kicking people in the face.  Surprisingly, however, “One Good Woman” did not make the cut for Big.  Director Penny Marshall opted instead for tunes by Billy Idol and Huey Lewis that weren’t written for the movie but which wouldn’t push audiences to the exits.  She would rather have licked the sweat off of Pat Morita’s karate mat than ruin her film with Cetera’s song.

I’m no Zoltar, but I’m going to make a bold prediction about the future:  there will not be any more music by Peter Cetera – or his former band Chicago – on this blog.  I bet this also grants one of your wishes.

My rating:  3 / 10

“Naughty Girls (Need Love Too)” by Samantha Fox (1988, #3)

One person’s view:  “Well, this song is a Hindenburg-level disaster on all fronts.  ...  The percussion sounds like it’s at war with itself, the bass has no presence, and there’s variant sounds that can’t decide on being either the melody or the rhythm.” – Nerd with an Afro

The public’s view:  2.58 / 5.00

British women were simply not very sexy in the 1980s.  I know this sounds like a bigoted stereotype, but you’d agree if you saw the female idols that the U.K. was spewing out into the world.  The most famous Englishwoman of the era was, of course, the beloved humanitarian Princess Di.  She was never the subject of erotic fantasies, unless those fantasies somehow involved a ribbon-cutting ceremony at a hospital for landmine victims.  Scotland was represented by Sheena Easton, who tried way too hard to be a sex symbol but would always be known for her erection-killing duets with Kenny Rogers and Kermit the Frog.  Then there was Margaret Thatcher.  Hardly any teen boys were caught hiding lingerie photos of her between the pages of their math books.  Glamour, intelligence, and Tory grit were in great abundance in the Isles, but sex appeal was in short supply.

That finally changed when Samantha Fox arrived on the music scene in 1987.  Not only was she blatantly sexy, she was almost defiantly British.  Her working-class Cockney accent was what you would expect to hear from a lorry driver hauling crumpets and black pudding on the left side of a motorway in a steady rain.  Even her origin story was uniquely British.  At age 16, the scrappy young Samantha was invited to provide content to a London newspaper.  Her contributions were so relevant and insightful that they appeared all the way up on page 3.  That’s quite an achievement for someone so young.

Maybe I should clarify, though, that British newspapers aren’t known for their high-quality journalism.  One time when I was on a trip to the Kingdom, a paper’s lead story screamed at me in 250-point font that a certain soccer player had cheated on a girlfriend.  It wasn’t even one of the three soccer players who I have heard of:  Lionel Messi, Pelé, or that sporty-looking woman who was in our faces constantly a few years ago.  (I think her name might have been Caitlin?)  The headline was something like “FLAKEY FRANKIE FINDS FLOOZY FOLLOWING FOOTY FLOP”.  A much smaller headline noted that hundreds of people had died in an aviation disaster, with details to be found on page 11.  From this I can deduce that Samantha Fox’s page 3 editorials focused on matters that were more important than mass tragedies but less so than the carousing of athletes.  I’m guessing that she wrote about defiantly British issues like whether her MP should support a council tax on cottaging, or whether the Crown should end the annual stipend of eight sheep to the Earl of Worcestershire that was instituted in 1252.  We’ll never know for sure, because her newspaper ponderings have been lost to the bird cage of time.

Her single “Naughty Girls (Need Love Too)” hasn’t fared much better.  It is considered inferior to her first hit “Touch Me (I Want Your Body)”, and it almost never makes it onto playlists of classic ‘80s songs.  “Naughty Girls” was written and produced by the Full Force studio team, who critics previously blamed for the inadequacies of Lisa Lisa’s “All Cried Out”.  Full Force members Bowlegged Lou and Paul Anthony also made a return appearance on the backing vocals, once again demonstrating that bowlegged people sing exactly like straight-legged people and thus there is no need for both on the same record.  Thankfully, neither Kenny Rogers nor Kermit the Frog was present to interfere with Samantha’s seductive chants.

Fox’s musical persona was that of a woman enthusiastically pursuing her carnal desires without shame.  That may have been a slight step forward for gender equality in the 1980s, but her three big hits “Touch Me”, “Naughty Girls”, and “I Wanna Have Some Fun” are not anthems of female empowerment.  They are mostly just songs about how she completely loses control of herself in the presence of men.  (This is not true at all of the real Samantha Fox, who is married to a woman.)  Not surprisingly, all three tracks were the product of male songwriters.

Although Samantha did a reasonably good job of tickling my teenage hormones back in 1988, her brand of soft-core stimulation now feels as dated as Full Force’s brand of freestyle.  We’re living in the age of Cardi B, Latto, and other confident women whose explicit raps send middle-aged Fox News hosts into shrill tizzy fits.  It’s difficult to be wowed by the male fantasies embodied in “Naughty Girls (Need Love Too)”, even when they are relayed to us by the sexiest woman north of the Chunnel.

My rating:  5 / 10