i heart heart. as a girl in the 1970s, i loved to hear ann and nancy wilson kicking ass musically. they wrote amazing songs, they intrepidly covered zeppelin, and they showed that ladies could rock as hard as any guy out there. they were utter inspiration to me and to millions of girls. when i was 13, i thought you could do a lot worse than be ann wilson.
but times changed. they needed a hit in the ’80s, something slick and refined that would garner airplay and MTV play. and on the video front, record company management supposedly didn’t like the fact that ann fought with her weight — apparently, you need to be skinny and hot to be a major rock star. (go ahead. watch the videos for this or anything else they did in the 1980s. you’ll see plenty of shots of blonde nancy and her svelteness. you’ll get tighter shots of ann from the chest up. it’s unreal.) so ann and nancy made some schlocky records and kept the lens focusing away from ann, a giant slap in the face of a rock queen.
the schlockiest of the schlock, what about love, makes me cry to see how the mighty had fallen.
there are few words to share how much i loathe this song. they sound like they’re shouting the chorus, sort of like barking dogs. between this song and never, i pretty much shut them out for the rest of the decade, hiding myself in their old records. we can’t go on running away they sang, but i was willing to try to run as fast and as far as i could from their newfangled image until it stopped.
all these macho anthems become favorites of people whose most difficult survival experience is making it through a day of work without snapping and going on a shooting spree. this was bombastic and overblown when it was released in 1982. now, it sits, like a bloated elvis, ready to topple over and off a toilet. please join me as i try to close the eye of the tiger. let it rest peacefully in the annals of history. it’s 2009. no one should have to suffer needlessly through this song anymore.
there are several artists in the 1980s who make it difficult for a hater music critic like myself. billy ocean is one of those people. his musical output in the 1980s is a scourge on the face of the musical earth. i mean, how can you pick when you can choose from such works as suddenly (which, i would add was my brother and sister-in-law’s wedding song — this being BTD, the guy who probably single-handedly hepled influence my complete and utter neurosis fascination with rock, which tells you that love does strange things to people), there’ll be sad songs (to make you cry) (yeah… like this one), soundtrack staple when the going gets tough, and of course, his mega-hit, caribyooon queencaribbean queen(now we’re sharing the same dream… would that be the one about world domination? nope. didn’t think so.) yes, millions swooned to billy ocean’s mellow sound, including chris rock’s sister on everybody hates chris.
but not me.
the man has an inviting voice… and what does he do? he orders me to get into his vehicle. do i know whether he’s been drinking? do i know whether he’s got a record? do i know whether he even has a license? no. but somehow, simply by virtue of the fact that he has been dreaming about me, i am supposed to drop what i’m doing and go for a drive with him? mr. ocean, didn’t your mom teach you a thing or two about how to treat a lady?
i have the feeling that part of what made this song a hit was the video. if you look, you’ll notice some cutting edge (for 1988) animation interacting with ocean, the same sort of thing your homegirl paula abdul would later use. (is that a duck witha boombox?) yep. cartoon fish are what passes for entertainment. and the new twist on the mousy librarian who takes her glasses off and pulls her hair down is the lady at the carwash who has some satin number underneath her work jumper. of course, her outfit cannot compare with ocean’s giant white muu-muu of a caftan suit. ah, eighties videos and songs. you think it can’t get much worse than this.
the song, originally pass the kouchie (slang for bong), was sanitized for these british-jamaican schoolboys and converted into a song about a dutchie (cooking pot.) Loaded with political overtones (how do you feel when you got no food?), the song shot to number one here and all over the place.
Something about the song drove me nuts when it came out. Was it the mind-numbing chorus that echoed through my brain on constant repeat? Was it the fact that boys were singing a song that really, really was about drug use, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, for someone else’s commercial success? Was it the fact that a piece of the melody sounded a little like a carpenter’s song i loathed, top of the world? or was it the fact that half the time, i could not figure out what the hell the little dude was saying?
who knows. but the song has not improved with age, at least not for me.
at this moment is one of those songs that didn’t do amazingly well the first time around (1981), but boy, the second time was the charm, thanks to my boy alex p. keaton. alex, played by my beloved michael j. fox, was one of the star characters of the hit ’80s comedy family ties, a show that poked fun at liberals and conservatives alike. during the show, alex fell in love with a young lady named ellen reed who was played by tracy pollan. pollan and fox ultimately married in real life and are still together to this day, raising a family and fighting the good fight against fox’s parkinson’s disease. anyway, during some charged romantic scene between alex and ellen, at this moment played in the background. apparently, people went nuts and asked for this song. one quick re-release later and bingo, bango, billy vera and the beaters had a hit on their hands.
i tend to shy away from sappy songs, and this one is definitely retro-sap. with sincere apologies to friends like testosterone zone (who i know loves this song dearly), i never could stand this song. and the beaters? what sort of beaters? the mind reels.
billy went on to guest star in plenty of TV and movie projects and is still involved in music today, both playing and as an historian. the beaters are still playing with billy. (i know. that sentence simply is wrong. bear with me. i didn’t name the band.) and easy listening stations everywhere continue to play at this moment, perhaps somewhere at this moment.
ah, the lady in red. somehow, it sounds so much more romantic, lady in red, then, say, the harlot in scarlet. when this song came out in 1986, i was a bit sour on the idea of love. (to put it mildly.) sappy love songs, especially ones that are the aural equivalent of valium as this one is to me, were not my style, not then and not now. how lovely, a romantic contrarian might think, that the singer remembers what his wife was wearing the first time they met (as the story goes.) i’m sure if you asked my husband what i was wearing, he would have that deer in the headlights look. fortunately, there are so many, many other important reasons why he is a keeper. (hell. there are days when i’m not entirely certain what i had for breakfast.)
anyway, as a followup to his earlier minor hit don’t pay the ferryman, de burgh’s lady in red was just incredibly disappointing to me. it is the poster child for the concept of twee.
as an aside, i cannot hear this song now without thinking of one of the most psychotic television characters i have seen in a long time: trevor morgan. trev, who i am pretty sure was voted the worst of the worst in terms of meanness on a variety of UK polls, is the presumed dead ex-husband of Little Mo on my beloved EastEnders. an incredibly abusive spouse, trevor would pummel the mousy Mo and make her feel like she had earned it. he shoved her face in food on the floor and made her eat it. he bloodied her. her had an affair — with a baby resulting — and yelled at Mo for trying to figure it all out.
finally, on a new years eve, Little Mo was babysitting at pauline fowler’s house when the doorbell rang.
ding dong: psycho calling!
mo made the grave error of opening the door. BAM! trevor came in and started to pound away. only, too bad for trevor: pauline fowler kept her kitchen well-stocked with cleaning supplies. mo grabbed a hot iron she was using and BAM! she beat the hell out of trevor. her sisters came in and helped her hide trevor’s body and clean up the kitchen, but when they went to check on trevor’s body — he had disappeared…
little mo ended up spending time in prison for what she had done, and trevor continued to terrorize her until he essntially burned up in a house explosion, along with the at-the-time hottie on the square, tom. such a waste, but for such a good cause.
anyway, what does all of this have to do with lady in red?
hello, and welcome to a month of egregious ’80’s music. our first offender? sheenapoo. it wasn’t easy to pick which one of her musical contributions was most offensive; after all, she also sang prince’s sugar walls, an incredibly vile song about a vay-jay-jay.
but morning train bothered me from the very first time i heard it. when it was released in 1980, i could not see anything redeeming in a bouncy-brite pop tune about a lady who basically waits at home all day long until her man comes home from work. yep, nothing to see here, just a lady who is completely and utterly dependent on her guy for her happiness.
now at 15, i had read plenty of articles in magazines telling me that the worst thing in the world that i could do in my existence would be to basically drop everything for a boy. to hear miss white-bread dizz-ball proclaiming that she spent eight straight hours doing nothing but sit and stay while her master is away was vomit-inducing then (and now.) why, go do something useful in the world, hon. get a job. volunteer. be a human, fer cryin’ out loud.
unbelievably, the song gets worse:
He takes me to a movie
Or to a restaurant, to go
Slow dancing
Anything I want
Only when he’s with me
I catch a light
Only when he gives me
Makes me feel alright
did i shut my eyes and enter the 1950s? can someone please get this chick a copy of the feminine mystique, please! i feel like i need to sponsor an intervention here! girl, if you only got a job, you could pay for things you want and not have to wait for this dude. you can take yourself to your own damn movie — a chick flick, even — and not have to wait until he deems it ok. even i, at 15, knew that there was something terribly, horribly awful about the message this song was sharing: depend on your man and of course he will always look after you.
until his leggy secretary enters the picture.
girl — you’re good enough, you’re smart enough, and gosh darn it — you have bouncin’ and behavin’ 80s hair. derail yourself from this song and move on.
as i write this, i am trying to make it through perhaps the worst month, or at least one of the very worst months, i have encountered in my short but eventful career as a human. you may recall the start of the month when both my husband and my ceiling collapsed just over 24 hours apart. and yes, i left for san francisco, a story i have yet to finish here.
later that week, i took BC for a tonsillectomy/adenoidectomy, a simple operation with a short healing period everyone said. bring on the ice cream. only, too bad for the girl — she’s probably the only child on the planet who isn’t keen on ice cream, ice pops, or other soft, cold foods. additionally, the pain meds didn’t control her pain, and when they were raised, she threw up. on columbus day afternoon, she ended up visiting the ER to get some IV fluids because she was completely tapped out. when she returned, we thought we were going to turn a corner. and we did.
a bad one.
girlfriend was still not eating or drinking and getting sicker by the day, complete with a fever. anti-nausea meds were not making things any better. by wednesday morning, the ENT on call told me to take her back to the ER and possibly get her admitted to get her back on track. that’s exactly what happened. she and i spent wednesday through saturday noon at fairfax inova, a terrific hospital for pediatrics. we had a few challenges: one morning, we awoke to find the roof leaking onto her IV, so we were moved next door to a room where he child inside was confined because of “droplets” — a sure sign that someone in there had something contagious.
hospitals are important institutions, and i surely am not knocking them in any way, shape or form, as lord knows we have needed them in the past and will one day need them again, perhaps. but a hospital is not a great place to stay healthy.
i can’t be 100 percent certain, but i think that’s where girlfriend and i caught the flu.
when we were released on saturday, i thought the worst was over. girlfriend returned to school on monday. tuesday, i finally got my IVIG, albeit two weeks after i was supposed to get hooked up (i couldn’t schedule it while my poor little girl was recuperating.) tuesday afternoon, i started feeling poorly; at the same time, i received a phone call from the school clinic: come pick up BC. she has a fever of 101.5F.
what????
so girlfriend and i proceeded to spend some more quality time together. we went to her pediatrician’s on wednesday as a follow-up for her hospitalization. the doctor, noting that she still had a fever and was coughing, asked us to start some tamiflu just in case. BC is not yet adept at swallowing pills, so we visited a local old-fashioned pharmacy to get the darn stuff compounded into a liquid. (for you trivia buffs, the actual compounding part? not covered by insurance.) just before noon, she started tamiflu.
and at 1:00? she threw up a little blood.
people had warned me that when the artery/ies behind the tonsils blow, you need to run, not walk, to an ER. halfway there, i pulled over. there’s no more blood, mommy BC pointed out. i called BTD because, after all, he is my Brother The Doctor, who talked me down from the ledge and told me that if it stopped, go home. if the levee breaks, you’d know it.
at 3 am that morning, the levee broke.
girlfriend tugged at my sleeve. mommy, my mouth is full of blood! sure enough, it was extremely clear what was happening. we put on our shoes, i grabbed my purse, and off we rode into the night. i ran red lights, i ran over a median at the hospital, and i parked the car in front of the ER. (thank you, G-d, for the parking space.) the triage nurse took her in pretty speedily — i am, pathetically, an experienced ER patient at virginia hospital center, you know; and this was much faster than when i had almost no platelets left in my body — and next thing you know, we are in a bed in the ER. the doctor talked for a minute and left. i looked at girlfriend. suddenly, she vomited up a tremendous amount of blood, more than i had ever seen in one place that was not in a transfusion or donation bag.
i was terrified! i pulled open the curtain. please help! my daughter is throwing up blood!!
three nurses and the doctor came running to see poor little BC, spewing so much blood that i was terrified that she was going to faint. or worse. off came the clothes. in went the IV (not easily, either.) and soon enough, girlfriend was whisked off to emergency surgery to close things up.
i waited for about an hour until the doctor came out and told me that he’d closed up the leaker. normally, he’d send her home after recovery; but after hearing her recent history, he wanted to keep her for the day to make sure she was on the right track. if she behaved herself, he would send her home around dinner time.
i was frantically calling home on the hospital phone (i left my cell home when i ran out), only to remember that i had brought all the phones upstairs to my room so that ringing would not wake up BS, who desperately needed sleep and who was camping out downstairs. so i just continued to leave messages on his cell and on the home phone voice mail, hoping eventually i’d get a live person. and i did, two hours later. BS came to the hospital at 9, just after he’d gotten jools to school. this was a good thing. this meant that i could finally hit the doctor’s myself, as i was not feeling so great by this time. adrenaline had taken me pretty freaking far, but i didn’t think it was going to last.
because my doctor was booked, i ended up visiting Ye Olde Doc In The Box (aka the urgent care clinic.) lots of people wearing masks and a receptionist telling me that there was already a 90 minute wait were not stellar signs, but this was the only opportunity i was going to get, so i sat and sat with my mask on, trying not to pass out. when the nurse called me in, she noticed my hospital bracelet, the one i got from earlier in the day. when i explained how the day had started, she was pretty startled. nevertheless, she noted, we need to test you for flu.
for the record, having pointy q-tips shoved hard up both nostrils is not pleasant.
long story short: doctor comes in and tells me that i have type A influenza. but hey, i protested, i had the regular flu shot last month!
well then, you probably have swine flu. but they’re both treated the same way, so does it really matter?
with apologies to gertrude stein: tamiflu is tamiflu is tamiflu.
i give the doc props — he actually called up my immunologist to double-check how i should be handled. they both decided that with my track record of bacterial infections, i should rock the zithromax as well.
so basically, BC and i have both been fighting the flu. poor little girl has been fighting it on top of recuperating from not one, but two surgeries. i am praying my husband and son do not get sick or this house of cards will crumble. as you can imagine, my creativity is the least of it at this moment.
so here’s my favorite song of all time. nothing to feel guilty about. completely unfunny, especially since it’s about a guy who burns down a woman’s house because she doesn’t put out. but still an incredibly beautiful song, even when john gets creepy at the end, as he does in this version.
i know i’ll be feeling better soon, everyone will be better soon, and the world will be right again. in the meantime, everyone wash your freaking hands, cover your freaking mouths, and take care of yourselves!!!
yes, national blog posting month. every year for the past few years, i have been making a concerted effort to blog every single day in the month of november. i tend to pick a theme (or few) and beat it to deathattract people who probably ought to get better hobbies rather than arguing with me over the idea that the song playground in my mind has redeeming qualities start lively discussions. it’s a lot of fun, and i make a lot of new bloggy friends this way, many of whom i am quite good friends with now. (and no, i am not being stalked. yet. i think.) in november 2007, i took on several leitmotifs: best and worst children’s books ever (it was a bonding moment when i discovered that i am not the only person who loathes the giving tree) as well as great grownups music for kids.
last year, i took on the now-legendary blatantly bad ’70s music. and make no mistake about it: people out there do respond to this delightful tiptoe through some truly awful music. oh, the agony of the earworms! oh, the pain of hearing people defend why wildfireis just the most. amazing. song. evah. oh, the magic of songs like i’ve been to paradise, but i’ve never been to me! yes, i had to do penance for that monthus terribulus by providing an entire month of guilty pleasure mondays that were good 1970s songs. songs like bad blood by neil sedaka and elton john.
you’re welcome.
it was so much fun to crucify some of the worst in ’70s music that i thought, hell, why not go after the eighties? that’s my primary era, and there’s so much crap there — some wildly obvious. so i’m making a list and checking it twice. and in november, hold onto your izods and your jheri curls, cos i’m going to attempt to corral some of the most awful offenders on your then-radio dial. (or MTV station, back when Music Video Television actually played videos.)
so please: share your requests in the comments section below or on my contact page. (not on my facebook page, please, as i will lose your stuff in a matter of days when the comments go south.)
the request line is open.
(and, as always, guilty pleasure monday gets suspended in november so you can get all the earworms i can squeeze into a month. bad ones, that is.)
i love the rocky horror picture show…not enough to dress up like any of the characters and act it out, but enough to have seen it a few times in my formative years.
i have plenty of tales of my rocky horror movie viewings, including one that required my friends and i to spend some serious time in the belmar police station (not my doing, incidentally; i was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.) but the first time i saw the rocky horror picture show, i was struck by two things: a roll of toilet paper (right in the eye, damn it) and rice. i was also struck by the surreality of the story line. my most difficult realization was that some of the characters were related…which was an incredibly gross idea. as always, i was trying desperately to follow the plot and understand the message; only, too bad for me. there really is no message.
the whole point, i think, is participation. people yelling the lines at the scream, people dressed up and acting the show out in front of the film, people, in short, behaving badly: a dream for a teenager who always behaved, i think.
now, i put the tamer kidz bop version on my kids’ mp3 players. i really don’t have the stomach to explain what a pelvic thrust is all about for now, and kidz bop sufficiently bowdlerizes it all, just in time for halloween. it’s cool — the whole family can do the time warp, and no one can be the wiser.
i suspect that when columbus discovered america, he had no intention of claiming it for sweet transvestites, meatloaf, and pink haired ladies. sorry, chris.
