Musical Monday - Give It Up by KC and the Sunshine Band

#1 on the Billboard Hot 100: Never.

#1 on the Cash Box Top 100: Never.

#1 on the U.K. Chart: August 13, 1983 through August 27, 1983.

This is a song by a band at the end of its life, bereft of interesting ideas, desperate to churn out anything that will keep it relevant and failing badly. By 1983, the career of KC and the Sunshine Band was on life support. Their last notable hit had been in 1980 with the eminently forgettable Please Don't Go. They were, by 1983, a disco-era band that was trying to make it in a pop music landscape that was extremely hostile to disco music.
It doesn't help that this song is simply not very good. It has a dance beat, but everything about it seems almost like the band is just going through the motions. There's no real hook, no real substance to the lyrics, nothing particularly interesting about the vocal delivery, and nothing particularly memorable about the instrumentation. This song is bland, generic, and boring.

The blandness of the song isn't really helped by the video, which doesn't really do anything to illustrate or highlight the song. In the past I highlighted a couple of music videos that had inexplicably science fictional themes, and this one goes onto that list. The song is a generic dance song, while the video is a badly acted oddball fantasy horror quest where the climax is untying some ropes and an almost completely random deus ex machina. There's literally no connection between the music and the images presented, and that makes the entire thing almost entirely unmemorable.

This was the last gasp of KC and the Sunshine Band, and I can only say that after this they deserved the obscurity that awaited them.

Previous Musical Monday: Wherever I Lay My Hat (That's My Home) by Paul Young

Subsequent Musical Monday: Red Red Wine by UB40

Previous #1 on the U.K. Chart: Wherever I Lay My Hat (That's My Home) by Paul Young

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

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

KC and the Sunshine Band     1980s Project     Musical Monday     Home

Musical Monday - Love of a Lifetime by FireHouse

A few days ago, a friend and I were talking about power ballads, and got into a small debate over exactly what constitutes a power ballad. For those who didn't grow up in the 1980s, power ballads are, at the most basic level, songs released by rock bands that are intended to be romantic and sweet, but still have enough amplified electric guitars to remind everyone that the band members really are rockers at heart. Virtually every hair metal band from Mötley Crüe to Poison to Europe released at least one power ballad. Although there were some exceptions, there was something of a pattern established by a lot of bands in which they released a high-energy rockin' song first, presumably to establish their "metal" bona fides, and then a power ballad so they could sell a lot of albums and pack stadiums full of women.

I was poking around this past weekend, and I believe that this song is the Platonic Ideal of a power ballad. It is a sweet, treacly love song with some edgy guitars thrown in. The band is a pretty typical 1980s hair metal band - it looks like about eighteen cans of Aqua-Net were used in the making of this video. The only thing they are lacking are color coordinated leather outfits akin to those Warrant wears in their video for the song Heaven. What really tops the cake here is that the video has a perfect visual representation of what a power ballad is starting at 0:39 where Bill Leverty appears playing an acoustic guitar that is on a stand while wearing an electric guitar so it will be ready for when the song transforms from the "ballad" portion of the song to the "power" part.

Previous Musical Monday: The Easter Song by Paul & Storm

Subsequent Musical Monday: Please Don't Go by KC and the Sunshine Band

FireHouse     Musical Monday     Home

Musical Monday - I'm Gonna Getcha Good by Shania Twain

Once upon a time, Shania Twain was a country music star. Then she decided that she wanted to be a crossover star and make pop songs. Apparently part of this plan was to make a music video that had an inexplicable science fiction theme and really didn't make any sense at all.

There is nothing in the song that suggests a science fiction themed video would make sense, and the actual "plot" seems almost backwards. Shania is singing about how she's "gonna get you", but she spends the entire video on her magical motorcycle zooming through a CGI land trying to escape from a giant robot that is trying to get her. Oddly the way the sequence is presented, the robot wouldn't have chased her if she hadn't set out on her motorcycle ride to begin with. The chase ends when the robot smashes itself against a pair of doors because it forgets to pay attention to where it is going. The chase is intercut with scenes of Shania wearing a catsuit and performing with her band as disinterested robots walk by in front of them. This part of the video ends with motorcycle Shania using one of the destroyed robot's eyeballs to shatter the plate glass window in front of band Shania, who then walks out onto the CGI street.

Nothing in this video makes any sense. The catsuit looks good on Shania though.

Previous Musical Monday: Just One Person by Kevin Clash, Dave Goelz, Richard Hunt, Jerry Nelson, Frank Oz, and Steve Whitmire

Subsequent Musical Monday: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly by the Danish National Symphony Orchestra

Shania Twain     Musical Monday     Home

Musical Monday - Magnetic by Earth, Wind, and Fire

This is another Musical Monday selection that is driven by the music video rather than the song. Magnetic doesn't really seem to have much science fictional content in its lyrics (although the album it appeared on, Electric Universe, may have been intended as a concept album, but that is speculation on my part based upon some of the song titles), but the video tells something of a dystopian science fiction story. I would say that the video seems a little bit reminiscent of The Running Man, but the movie was released in 1987, while this video came out in 1983, so it might be more accurate to say that The Running Man is reminiscent of Magnetic.

The video presents a cyber-punkish future in which electronically-aided fighters engage in televised street fights. There seems to be something of a revolutionary feel to the story, which culminates in one of the fighters offering a hand to the other rather than finishing his opponent off, but given the disconnect between the lyrics and the video, it seems hard to figure out what revolutionary message the band might have been trying to convey. Maurice White nodding sagely at the end after the crowd fades away suggests that they intended the sequence to mean something, but exactly what that might be is fairly opaque. I could venture some guesses, but they all seem like bland cliches.

The video is fun to watch though, and given that it was made in 1983, it is a pretty damn ambitious production.

Previous Musical Monday: You Got Lucky by Tom Petty

Subsequent Musical Monday: Simon Zealotes by Larry Marshall

Earth, Wind, and Fire     Musical Monday     Home

Musical Monday - You Got Lucky by Tom Petty

So this Musical Monday isn't really about the song, although the song is a good one. This Musical Monday is about the video, which for no real reason that I can discern, has a science fiction-related theme to it. In the case of You Got Lucky, the video presents a post-apocalyptic kind of Mad Max atmosphere. There's nothing in the song that is really thematically connected to the video, so I can only surmise that Tom Petty was a fan of the genre.

The interesting thing is that there are a number of other music videos that also bear a seemingly inexplicable science fiction theme. The songs themselves don't really have anything in them that suggests a science fiction or fantasy style video presentation would be appropriate, and yet they still have those themes. I can only assume that these sorts of videos are made because the performers are fans of the genre, because it has to be more expensive to make a video that has a bunch of science fiction props and a few special effects in it than it is to make one that is just a performance video, or some other mundane presentation of the song.

One would think that if they wanted to make a science fiction video, then more mainstream artists would write songs that relate to the genre. But even though science fiction music videos are not all that hard to find, a science fictional piece of popular music is almost vanishingly rare. There are a few songs here and there, but they are often deep cuts on an album, or the science fictional element is buried so deep in metaphor that it slips by a lot of listeners. I'm not complaining about this, but it is an oddity that I have noticed over the years - many pop performers seem to like the look of filmed science fiction, but don't seem to know how to make it actually part of their music.

Previous Musical Monday: Just My Imagination by the Cranberries

Subsequent Musical Monday: Magnetic by Earth, Wind, and Fire

Tom Petty     Musical Monday     Home