Musical Monday - Karma Chameleon by Culture Club

#1 on the Billboard Hot 100: February 4, 1984 through February 18, 1984.

#1 on the Cash Box Top 100: February 4, 1984 through February 18, 1984.

#1 on the U.K. Chart: September 24, 1983 through October 29, 1983.

Karma Chameleon is a song that seems like it should have some sort of subtle subtext in its meaning, but it really doesn't. It seems like it should be a roundabout way to talk about a break up, or a piece of political satire that uses imagery to avoid directly complaining about a particular political movement, or something like that. The song is, however, simply about karma, like the title says. Basically, the song's meaning amounts to "what goes around, comes around", with nothing deeper or more complex than that. Sometimes things are what they seem at first glance, and this song is one of those things.

Over all, Karma Chameleon turned out to be one of the signature songs of the decade. Although Culture Club entered a stormy (and ultimately destructive) period following the success of this song resulting from romantic entanglements within the group gone sour and other issues, and Boy George's incresingly difficult time dealing with both fame and drugs, Karma Chameleon, by itself, cements them into the pantheon of iconic 1980s musical acts.

Previous Musical Monday: Tell Her About It by Billy Joel

Subsequent Musical Monday: The Safety Dance by Men Without Hats

Previous #1 on the Billboard Hot 100: Owner of a Lonely Heart by Yes

Subsequent #1 on the Billboard Hot 100: Jump by Van Halen

Previous #1 on the Cash Box Top 100: Owner of a Lonely Heart by Yes

Subsequent #1 on the Cash Box Top 100: Jump by Van Halen

Previous #1 on the U.K. Chart: Red Red Wine by UB40

Subsequent #1 on the U.K. Chart: Uptown Girl by Billy Joel

List of #1 Singles from the Billboard Hot 100 for 1980-1989
List of #1 Singles from the Cash Box Top 100 for 1980-1989
List of #1 Singles on the U.K. Chart for 1980-1989

Culture Club     1980s Project     Musical Monday     Home

Musical Monday - Tell Her About It by Billy Joel

#1 on the Billboard Hot 100: The week of September 24, 1983.

#1 on the Cash Box Top 100: Never.

#1 on the U.K. Chart: Never.

In 1983, Billy Joel more or less took his career on a left turn, releasing the album An Innocent Man, which was a collection of music inspired by and paying tribute to the do-wop style of music of the late 1950s and early 1960s, a time frame that coincided with Joel's own teenage years. This video for Tell Her About It drives home the homage, imagining a 1963 appearance on the iconic Ed Sullivan Show. The video says that the appearance was supposedly on July 31, but that day in 1963 was a Wednesday, not a Sunday, so it could not actually have happened.

I think it is not an accident that the video chose a date in the summer of 1963 as the time for the fictitious Ed Sullivan appearance. This was, essentially, the closing phase of the dominance of do-wop music in American pop culture. Within the next six months, Beatlemania would sweep the country, pushing do-wop music out of the limelight. In February 1964, the Beatles would appear on the Ed Sullivan Show, marking a clear end to one era of music and the beginning of another.

This is not to say that Joel didn't appreciate the Beatles. I have seen interviews in which he talks about how much he loved the Beatles and how much they influenced his own music. They did, however, fundamentally change music and push aside a lot of the kind of music that Joel remembered fondly from his early teenage years. I suppose, by putting out this album and this video, Joel tried to rectify that by just a little bit.

Previous Musical Monday: Puttin' On the Ritz by Taco

Subsequent Musical Monday: Karma Chameleon by Culture Club

Previous #1 on the Billboard Hot 100: Maniac by Michael Sembello

Subsequent #1 on the Billboard Hot 100: Total Eclipse of the Hart by Bonnie Tyler

List of #1 Singles from the Billboard Hot 100 for 1980-1989
List of #1 Singles from the Cash Box Top 100 for 1980-1989
List of #1 Singles on the U.K. Chart for 1980-1989

Billy Joel     1980s Project     Musical Monday     Home

Musical Monday - Puttin' on the Ritz by Taco

#1 on the Billboard Hot 100: Never.

#1 on the Cash Box Top 100: September 17, 1983 through September 24, 1983.

#1 on the U.K. Chart: Never.

Every era has a hit that is both inexplicably and weirdly out of step with the pop culture of the era and simultaneously a prime example of the zeitgeist of the time. Taco's rendition of Puttin' on the Ritz is an example of this kind of song. An electronica cover version of a decades old song originally made popular by Fred Astaire and quite notably parodied in the movie Young Frankenstein, this was somehow both bizarrely out of step with the 1980s and also emblematic of the era. The fact that Taco himself appears to be channeling Tim Curry's Dr. Frank-n-Furter while cosplaying Astaire just makes this whole set-up seem both stranger and more comforting at the same time.

Previous Musical Monday: Maniac by Michael Sembello

Subsequent Musical Monday: Tell Her About It by Billy Joel

Previous #1 on the Cash Box Top 100: Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) by Eurythmics

Subsequent #1 on the Cash Box Top 100: The Safety Dance by Men Without Hats

List of #1 Singles from the Billboard Hot 100 for 1980-1989
List of #1 Singles from the Cash Box Top 100 for 1980-1989
List of #1 Singles on the U.K. Chart for 1980-1989

Taco     1980s Project     Musical Monday     Home

Musical Monday - Maniac by Michael Sembello

#1 on the Billboard Hot 100: September 10, 1983 through September 17, 1983.

#1 on the Cash Box Top 100: Never.

#1 on the U.K. Chart: Never.

I have noted before the pervasive influence that television and movies have on popular music, and to a certauin extent, the reverse is true as well. Maniac, from the sountrack of the movie Flashdance is yet another example of a movie pushing a song to the heights of popularity, and the music of a movie making the movie have cultural influence that vastly outweighs its actual performance as a movie.

Flashdance was a surprise success of a movie in 1983. No one expected it to do as well as it did, but the footprint it left on the culture outeighed anything that even its financial success would have predicted. Because of this movie, leg warmers and sweatshits with the neck cut out became ubiquitous fashions. The iconic "water drop" dance has been replicated, parodied, and paid tribute to countless times. "Welder-chic" briefly became a thing. And so on and so forth.

The weird thing is that even though the movie altered the cultural landscape of the decade, it did relatively little to help the careers of those who appeared in it. Jennifer Beales' career meandered aimlessly for a decade with roles in forgettable movies before having a couple of notable roles in the 1990s, and she finally settled in as a moderately successful television actress in the 2000s. None of the other actors had much of a boost to their careers. Michael Nouri's career also drifted from mediocre movie to mediocre movie. Cynthia Rhodes had a highlight in a secondary role in Dirty Dancing and a more prominent role in the Saturday Night Fever pseudo-sequel Staying Alive, but her career petered out after that (although, to be fair, that was in part because she married Richard Marx and started having children). Other than this song and the title track Flashdance . . . What a Feeling and Gloria, none of the other songs on the sountrack had significant chart success. None of the artists who appeared on the soundtrack got much of a career boost from it, and most of them, including Michael Sembello, saw their careers basically fizzle out shortly thereafter. Flashdance was a hit, and it pushed a couple of songs to the forefront of pop music for a bit but it appeared to have very little else in the way of coattails.

On a kind of unrelated note: Beals was not a dancer, despite being cast as the lead in a movie that was about a dancer working in a bar with other dancers who aspired to become a professional ballet dancer. As a result, most of the dance scenes in the movie, including the dance scenes in this video, were performed by a body double, mostly Marine Jahan, who was not credited in the movie. The only scenes in the video that are actually Beals are the close-ups of her face. Pretty mucyh everything else is Jahan. Flashdance doesn't really seem to have helped Jahan's career much either.

Previous Musical Monday: Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) by Eurythmics

Subsequent Musical Monday: Puttin' On the Ritz by Taco

Previous #1 on the Billboard Hot 100: Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) by Eurythmics

Subsequent #1 on the Billboard Hot 100: Tell Her About It by Billy Joel

List of #1 Singles from the Billboard Hot 100 for 1980-1989
List of #1 Singles from the Cash Box Top 100 for 1980-1989
List of #1 Singles on the U.K. Chart for 1980-1989

Michael Sembello     1980s Project     Musical Monday     Home

Running - Weekly Log for November 2, 2020 through November 8, 2020

Last Week's Mileage Goal: 45 miles
Actual Miles Last Week: 34.7 miles
Run/Walk Miles: 0 miles
Cumulative Mileage: 1,092.7 miles.
This Week's Mileage Goal: 45 miles
Current Weigh-In: 180

I ended up missing more days that I would have liked this week, so I think that to avoid this in the future, I'm going to be adding a short morning run to me routine. I don't really have enough time before work to do a full run the way I would like to, but I can put in a short run every day before I need to settle down and put in my workday. That way, on the days when I won't be able to do a full run in the evenings due to scheduling issues, I'll still get a couple of miles in to kick off the day. I've started experimenting with this, and I am cautiously optimistic that this will have some further benefits, as the day I tried this, I felt better the rest of the day as well. The upcoming week is the real test, so we'll see how this goes.

Previous Weekly Running Log: October 26, 2020 through November 1, 2020

Running     Home

Book Blogger Hop - November 6th - November 12th: Saint Augustine Adopted Manichaeism.in 372 A.D.

Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.

This week Billy asks: Have you ever participated in the NaNoWriMo? If yes, how did it go?

Nope. I have enough going on without adding an effort to write a novel as well.

Previous Book Blogger Hop: The Roman Poet Ausonius Wrote the Mosella in 371 A.D.

Subsequent Book Blogger Hop: Emperor Valens Converted to Arianism in 373 A.D.

Book Blogger Hop     Home

Musical Monday - Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) by Eurythmics

#1 on the Billboard Hot 100: The week of September 3, 1983.

#1 on the Cash Box Top 100: September 3, 1983 through September 10, 1983.

#1 on the U.K. Chart: Never.

This song is where synthesizer music crashed into the pop world. There had been techno pop hits before this, but none had topped the charts, none launched a figure to as much pop cultural dominance as this song did with Annie Lennox.

Literally everything about this song and this video was a metaphorical punch to the face of pop music. From the very first beat through to the very end, this song basically said to people who had grown up with pop rock from the 1970s "we aren't doing this the same way any more". There aren't any actual instruments being played on this track - it is entirely a synthesizer-generated song with the exception of Lennox's vocals. Layered on top of a driving bass line, Lennox's vocals are what really set this apart, soaring high above everything else in the song.

The video is just as in your face about its difference from the past. Lennox appears with a buzz cut, her hair dyed orange, and wearing a business suit, giving her a look that is simultaneously androgynous and incredibly sexy. Dave Stewart isn't even shown playing a keyboard or anything else that might be constructed as a "normal" piece of musical equipment. Instead, he taps on an MCS drum computer keyboard, almost daring the audience to try to figure out how his tapping links up with the music they are hearing. The only tiny concession to "music" in the video is the repeated showing of a cello, but the cello doesn't seem to actually have been used to create the string sounds in the song - apparently that was an Oberheim OB-X synthesizer.

It is hard to say exactly when "the 1980s" really arrived. The pop cultural zeitgeist of a decade always comes a few years after the calendar rolls over to a new tens digit, but the moment represented by this song is a strong candidate for when the 1980s swept away the last vestiges of the 1970s.

Previous Musical Monday: Red Red Wine by UB40

Subsequent Musical Monday: Maniac by Michael Sembello

Previous #1 on the Billboard Hot 100: Every Breath You Take by the Police

Subsequent #1 on the Billboard Hot 100: Maniac by Michael Sembello

Previous #1 on the Cash Box Top 100: Every Breath You Take by the Police

Subsequent #1 on the Cash Box Top 100: Puttin' On the Ritz by Taco

List of #1 Singles from the Billboard Hot 100 for 1980-1989
List of #1 Singles from the Cash Box Top 100 for 1980-1989
List of #1 Singles on the U.K. Chart for 1980-1989

Eurythmics     1980s Project     Musical Monday     Home

Running - Weekly Log for October 26, 2020 through November 1, 2020

Last Week's Mileage Goal: 45 miles
Actual Miles Last Week: 36.4 miles
Run/Walk Miles: 0 miles
Cumulative Mileage: 1,058 miles.
This Week's Mileage Goal: 45 miles
Current Weigh-In: 180

I missed three days of running this week. The first, Thursday, looks like it is going to be unavoidable going forward due to scheduling issues. I'm just going to have to factor that in as my weekly rest day going foward. The other twu - Saturday and Sunday - were because I was recovering from a nearly fifteen mile run on Friday. I like the really long runs, and to get to where I would like to be, I'm going to have to figure out how to incorporate them without putting me off the roads tfor two days afterwards.

Previous Weekly Running Log: October 19, 2020 through October 25, 2020
Subsequent Weekly Running Log: November 2, 2020 through November 8, 2020

Running     Home