On which I write about the books I read, science, science fiction, fantasy, and anything else that I want to. Currently trying to read and comment upon every novel that has won the Hugo and International Fantasy awards.
#1 on the Billboard Hot 100: November 12, 1983 through December 3, 1983.
#1 on the Cash Box Top 100: November 19, 1983 through December 3, 1983.
#1 on the U.K. Chart: Never.
If you asked me to name the most bland, boring, and unexciting "party" song of all time, I would unhesitatingly tell you it is All Night Long. The video tries desperately to make this song exciting, but the bright colored clothes and the forced smiles just highlight how utterly uninteresting this song is. When Richie sings "we're going to party, karamu, fiesta, forever", it sounds like someone's Dad running into a room full of teens, turning on all the lights, throwing on a Perry Cuomo record and saying "this is how we partied when I was young!". This entire song is a "hello, fellow kids" meme set to a soft rock beat.
#1 on the U.K. Chart: November 5, 1983 through December 3, 1983.
All songs are snapshots in time. Sometimes those snapshots are relatively short-lived. The song Uptown Girl and its related video were made during the rush Joel was experiencing from his new relationship with Christie Brinkley. You can see and hear the joy and exuberance of that fresh and exciting moment in the performance. There is simply so much hope, exhilaration, and expectation evident here.
And of course, now, in 2021, we know that Joel and Brinkley did go on to get married, have a child, and then get divorced. The oddity of moments like that depicted in Uptown Girl is that we now know the ultimate outcome of the events that will flow from that moment, and it casts them in a different light. I will always remember when I found out that the marriage at the centerpiece of John Denver's Annie's Song fell apart, and how that just seemed so wrong. This seems similarly tragic in a way - none of the people in this video know what is in store for them over the next few years, both the highs and the lows. It is a moment in time caught forever, with all of the emotions of those involved untainted by what was to come.
#1 on the Billboard Hot 100: October 29, 1983 through November 5, 1983.
#1 on the Cash Box Top 100: November 5, 1983 through November 12, 1983.
#1 on the U.K. Chart: Never.
By 1983, the Bee Gees were essentially persona non grata on the pop charts. Having firmly associated themselves with the disco era, once disco had become an anathema to many people, the Bee Gees went from being the top musical act in the world to an act that couldn't give away tickets. The odd thing is that Bee Gees style music was as popular as ever, as witnessed by the chart-topping success of this song, which had been penned by the Bee Gees, but was handed off to Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton to sing.
Islands in the Stream isn't unique on this score. The 1980s featured several hit songs that were written by one or more of the Bee Gees but sung by someone else - a list of artists that included songs by Barbra Streisand, Diana Ross, and Dionne Warwick. Basically, anyone but the Bee Gees seems like they could have success in the 1980s with a Bee Gees song. This quirky phenomenon suggests that the backlash against disco and disco-associated artists wasn't so much about the music as it was about the culture. Disco music was "urban" music, and "urban" was, as it often is, a code word for black and gay. People didn't like disco because they didn't like the music - they kept making disco-style music into chart-toppers as long as it wasn't called disco and wasn;t sung by recognizable disco acts - they just didn't like black and gay people influencing the wider culture.
A large part of the reason Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton could make Islands in the Stream into a hit in 1983 was that they were safe, white, country music artists who never made a disco song. Except for this one. Which they didn't call a disco song. This isn't to say that Rogers and Parton did anything wrong here, but they definitely benefitted from factors well beyond their control that served to position this song as a hit.
#1 on the Cash Box Top 100: The week of October 1, 1983.
#1 on the U.K. Chart: Never.
The Safety Dance is a song that people think is about something really deep and meaningful, but is in fact about something completely different. The persistent rumor surrounding this song is that it is an allegory about nuclear war, or rather the fear of nuclear war and a protest against the same. I have had this confidently asserted to me on multiple occasions by several different people. The writer and singer of the song, however, says it is about dancing. Literally. Or rather it is about doing the 'wrong" kind of dancing as an anti-establishment protest. Or something.
My takeaway here is that people want the music they love to have a significance it often does not have. If the lyrics to a song are even a little bit ambiguous, and you attach it to a weird and nigh-incomprehensible music video with a dwarf and Morris dancers and a mildly confusing coda of images and people will fill in their own interpretations. This song is about what it says it is about. For years, people have tried to make it be about something more, because they want the art in their life to have depth and meaning.
The real question here is does the intent of the creator definitively settle these sorts of issues? Is the song just about getting thrown out of a dance club for pogoing, or does the cultural zeitgeist that it is about more than that carry weight? Does it matter if people want to give a song significance that was not originally intended?
#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.
#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.
#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
#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.
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.
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.
#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.
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.
#1 on the Billboard Hot 100: The week of October 15, 1988.
#1 on the Cash Box Top 100: The week of October 15, 1988.
#1 on the U.K. Chart: September 3, 1983 through September 17, 1983.
This version of Red Red Wine is a cover version of a cover version of a 1967 Neil Diamond song that was rereleased in the U.S. five years after it was a top hit in the U.K. That's a pretty long and winding road for a song to take.
This song is actually an example of something that probably can't really happen any more. The song was a big hit in the U.K. in 1983, but went almost entirely unnoticed in the U.S. Five years later, it was promoted by some interested music industry folks following a performence of the song at Nelson Mandela's birthday celebration, and it became a top hit in the United States. This sort of delayed flow through the cultural psyche just doesn't happen in the modern interconnected world where pop culutre flashes around the globe so quickly that if you blonk you miss it.
The delay in the song reaching popularity in the U.S. did create a kind of oddly jarring circumstance in which a song made during the ennui of the economic malaise of the early 1980s in the U.K. became a big hit in the U.S. in 1988, when the country was kind of riding high. The song and the video that goes with it depict a kind of depressing existence in which drinking is the only respite from a life of underemployment and disappointment, which fit perfectly with the zeitgeist of the recessionary economy of the early-1980s. It also fit perfectly with a band whose name was a reference to a government form used for claiming unemployment benefits. By 1988 though, the song felt kind of weirdly out of place.
Last Week's Mileage Goal: 45 miles Actual Miles Last Week: 36.3 miles Run/Walk Miles: 0 miles Cumulative Mileage: 1,021.6 miles. This Week's Mileage Goal: 45 miles Current Weigh-In: 180
I was able to run seven miles every weekday this week, but I wasn't able to get any running done over the weekend, so I missed my weekly mileage goal again. Even so, I was able to run 36 miles this week, which has me feeling pretty good about my conditioning. on the downside, one of the reasons I didn't run over the weekend was that my right heel was bothering me again, so I'm hoping that doesn't run into an issue that hampers my running again.
In a fit of optimism, I'm going to aim for 45 miles again this week. Also, since we are getting close to the end of the month, I'll be aiming for my monthly goals as well. The largest goal I set for this month was to run 300 kilometers this month - an average of just under ten kilometers per day. I'm pretty much on track for that, so with any luck I should get there in the next week.
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: If you go trick-or-treating with your favorite book character, who would it be?
Éomer from the Lord of the Rings. I'd definitely go trick or treating with Éomer. We'd probably ride horses from house to house, looting the candy from each dwelling as we go.
