The worst songs in the world... ever!: 1985

Showing posts with label 1985. Show all posts

Saturday, December 5, 2009

"Tears are Not Enough" by Northern Lights (1985)

It's funny how the music industry works, really. The singer of a moderately-popular Irish band, the Boomtown Rats, sees a report on TV about famine in Africa and is inspired to 'do something' about it. Somehow, his initial impulse spirals into a super-huge phenomenon that, while certainly noble and practical in value, does cause a deluge of rather bad music circa the mid-eighties.

Not that it started out so bad: Bob Geldof's own “Do They Know It's Christmas?”, recorded with such luminaries of the British and Irish pop music industry as Status Quo, Big Country and Ultravox, is actually quite decent, if you can get over the cringe-worthy moment when Bono grunts “thank God it's them instead of you” and the entire ethnocentricity behind the song's hook in a nation that's 34% Muslim and 44% Eastern Orthodox (celebrating Christmas in January). Michael Jackson came to the aid of Ethiopia with the more insipid yet still tolerable “We are the World”.

And then... then we have Bryan Adams. The man responsible for an endless stream of bland MOR-“hard rock” anthems all of which sound identical. Being Canadian (and what's more anglophone Canadian), Bryan Adams decided to help the people of Ethiopia by rounding up some of those globe-straddling heroes of Canadian music as Salome Bey, Carroll Baker, Liberty Silver and Alfie Zappacosta...

The result is, in the grand tradition of all-star charity tributes, horrible but imbued with a sense of seriousness that makes you feel bad for admitting it's horrible. How bad is it? Well, most of its terribleness can be summed up in about 15 consecutive seconds of the song, starting from the moment Corey “Sunglasses at Night” Hart takes the mic. A man afflicted with the same disease as Mick Jagger and forced to sing all of his lyrics through pouted lips, Hart gamely grunts out the line “it's time to send our message everywhere” (since until this time Canadian musicians were operating in silence on the topic of African famine) before adding a faux-Michael Jackson “cha-know” that ups the ridiculousness one point, before heading into...

Two lines in French, stuck in by three performers crowded around one mic, to represent the one-third of Canada that speaks French, in an otherwise entirely English-language song. Forced bilingualism is nothing new to Canadians, but the crassness of this particular example of tokenism is worse than normal. Rightfully sickened, Quebecois artists decided to go it alone, recording the unknown-outside-of-Quebec “Les yeux de la faim” instead. With no token English lines.

As if that weren't bad enough, the thrown-in French is followed by what is by far the most heinous moment of the song, the ludicrous jingoism of the line “let's show them Canada still cares” (sung by the generally politically-sound Bruce Cockburn) in order to reassure any starving Ethiopians who had been heard to say, “you know, it seems like Canada's just not as caring as they used to be”. Neither Britain, nor the USA, nor even Quebec felt the need to stick such a line in. It's immediately followed by Geddy Lee, one of the silliest vocalists in recorded history, “taking flight” on the line “oh, you kno-ooow that we'll be there” (hand-delivering food aid, presumably).

True understanding of this song can be achieved only in watching the video, where all of the principals hunker in turn around a mic in what might be a Sears Portrait Studio, invariably clenching their fists in front of them as if to signal to a passing eighteen-wheeler to pull its air horn. The song builds to its inevitable crecendo of group-sing-along of the chorus (this is a feature of every all-star charity song ever) over which certain principals, overcome presumably with emotion, break rank to 'improvise' key phrases from the song, such as “bridge the disawwwwnce, yeah” in a very orderly fashion. In the video, the chorus of Canada's best-and-brightest suddenly transforms to a rink full of hockey players. Yes, swaying and singing the song. I kid you not. Canada's turn at the all-star charity single game features Wayne Gretzky and whoever else gamely singing along. Which is, to be fair, not that much more ridiculous than the studio chorus including a handful of comedians such as Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara.

Because, you know, the whole thing wasn't already enough of a joke.

Saturday, September 26, 2009

"Walk of Life" by Dire Straits (1985)

I may well get crucified for this one: I know this is a well-loved song. The thing is that I can’t stand it. As a general rule, I hate all baseball music, and I’m not even sure if this is a baseball song. I don’t think it is, in fact: Mark Knopfler is British, and the song’s lyrics seem to say something about songs or music or something. Perhaps the ‘walk of life’ is a dance. Don’t know. Don’t care.

It’s the organ, you see. That’s what makes it ‘baseball music’. The rinky-dinky rink organ that just calls out ‘me and the boys having a good time with beer and barbecue’. Kind of like “Glory Days” by Bruce Springsteen, equally cringe-worthy. The whole thing reeks of a kind of fake enthusiasm and ‘gusto’ that is about as catchy as a lead pipe. I recently spoke about “Lay Down Sally” by Eric Clapton, and this song has pretty much the same qualities. I love happiness and breeziness and meaningless good-time party vibes in music. But if there’s some sincerity to it. This sounds like what a robot programmed to come up with ‘fun music’ might produce.

And as far as headbands go, none was more evil than Mark Knopfler’s. The ‘CD test’ album this came from, “Brothers in Arms” had a gorgeous title-track but also “Money for Nothing”, whose repugnant lyrics (ah, but it’s tongue-in-cheek, not really homophobic and demeaning at all) might make it even a worse song than this one if it weren’t for the fourteen-second solo guitar part that comes in about half a minute into the song and is the best fourteen-second solo guitar part on any guitar-wank technophilic CD to be released in the mid-eighties. So that’s why “Money for Nothing” isn’t here and this is.

Oh, plus the fact that I want to squeeze my head in a vice to stop the pain every time I hear this song.

Oh, plus the headband. This song deserves inclusion for the headband alone, if nothing else.

Thursday, September 10, 2009

"Addicted to Love" by Robert Palmer (1985)

It’s wrong to speak ill of the dead, I know. And in this particular case, his premature, unnatural death is genuinely tragic. Very sad.

Yet this does nothing to change the fact that the decades-long career of Robert Palmer was, pretty much without exception, horrible. After spending the seventies as a dilettante, making facile covers in a variety of genres spiritually alien to him (and the casual cheesiness and sexism of merely the album covers from this decade pretty much tell you everything there is to know), Palmer settled into the 80s as one of the best faces for the naked greed and ambition people ‘his age’ had developed by then.

It’s difficult not to have a love/hate relationship with the 80s. On the one hand, there was so much great music made – primarily music made for the consumption of kids, music that was scorned by the post-hippie ‘style makers’ of the time. Then there was this: ‘beer commercial’ music made by people wearing suits (not that there’s anything wrong with suits, mind you) and intended for mass consumption by people for whom music is a background – something for the ghetto blaster to play while playing catch in the backyard, for example. Not only is it music without a soul, it’s music that fetishises its lack of a soul.

Theoretically, I could have chosen any Robert Palmer song for inclusion here, and certainly it was a toss-up between this, its clone “Simply Irresistable”, “Some Like it Hot” (all the more reprehensible because Duran Duran and Chic, the ‘main bands’ of this side-project’s other members, were otherwise making decent music) and Palmer’s 1970s intro to corporate-rock, “Bad Case of Loving You”. All are equally terrible, all are interchangeable. Ultimately, it has to be this one, though. For several reasons:

That video. As so often happened in the 80s, confusing ‘sexist’ with ‘sexy’, it’s a leering, drooling, sneering video, present ‘women as musicians’ as a comical concept. All surface, no depth, ‘cool’ in intention but ultimately icky, it fit its soundtrack perfectly.
Clichés in lieu of meaning in the lyrics. Lyrics don’t have to have meaning, but they shouldn’t be just a long litany of cheesy wannabe-aphorisms like “The lights are on, but no-one’s home” either.
The line “your teeth guh-rind”. This teeth-cuh-lenchingly annoying line is ultimately the reason I chose this airbrushed muscle-man ode to naked ambition over any of its creator’s other, um, masterpieces. I can wake up in the night in a cold terror thinking about that annoying two-syllable ‘grind’. Truly, truly dastardly.

That this, shockingly enough, was designed as a duet with the truly magnificent Chaka Khan goes to show both how misguided the mid-eighties’ sense of ‘soul’ was and how lucky this English-Bahamanian was to have been born in the era where his sleazy soul-boy dribblings could, for reasons I’ll never understand, be interpreted as in some way ‘authentic’.

Alternately, I suppose Chaka just needed the money.