This is one of the very few places where I can make a statement like “I was so excited to find a near-mint copy of the Electric Dreams soundtrack” and get reactions other than people calling me a dork under their breath.
There’s this very cool shop in Reading, Pennsylvania, called Vertigo Music that’s run by this cool indie girl (one day I’ll ask her her name so that I can stop saying, “You know … that store with the cool indie girl”). I stop by on many of my trips to that area. She’s got a nice pile of one-dollar records, and the better albums are very reasonably priced. A few weeks ago I located the soundtrack I mentioned above for $8, which to me is a steal for something I don’t think I’d ever seen before. I also was able to pick up the Nails’ Mood Swings (featuring their only hit, “88 Lines About 44 Women”), another album I’d been searching for a long time.
I mention this for two reasons. The first is because I know you’ll understand my excitement in finding two albums I’ve wanted in my collection forever. No one else really does, to be honest. Second, I feel the need to let the world know about this place. In my area, just finding a record store is difficult, but when you walk into one that’s clean, inviting, well organized, and has a great selection of music without being overwhelming … well, it begs some attention. I’m assuming she does more business through her Gemm site than in-store, but if you’re ever in Reading, you should definitely stop in and check it out. The world needs more of these types of record stores.
Anyway, how about some more songs from artists whose names begin with the letter P, as we take a look at the bottom feeders — songs that charted at #41 or lower — from the Billboard Hot 100 chart during the 1980s.
I promised myself that I wouldn’t do it – that I wouldn’t dive into the already overcrowded waters of Michael Jackson obituary, hagiography and/or armchair autopsy. I managed to keep that promise for a whole month – primarily because I didn’t have a coherent “take” on Michael’s life or his death. Yet here I find myself … inevitably, inescapably, if about five weeks late.
I have declined to babble about the moments when Michael’s music provided my life’s soundtrack – how the J5’s Greatest Hits was the first album I ever owned as a 5-year-old; how my friends and I cruised my hometown debating whether the best part of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” was the “Mama say, mama sa, mama coo sa” part or the “Yee hahs!”; how the entire world (including even my cloistered grad-school community) paused to take in the premiere of the “Black or White” video and then burned up the phone lines asking each other, “What the fuck was that last part?”
I have stifled the urge to pontificate on how the world leapt right past forgiveness to forgetfulness last month, or how the family trotted out and exploited Michael’s long-sheltered children to help ensure that his extramusical legacy wouldn’t (exclusively) involve images of surgical masks, hyperbaric chambers, court appearances, Emmanuel Lewis and Bubbles. And I’ve remained quiet as, in the weeks since the memorial service, we have so quickly and efficiently stuffed MJ into Elvis’ (metaphorical) box. To wit: Elvis was a hugely influential pop progenitor and oft-described King who died bloated, sequined and strung out on prescription medication. Michael was a hugely influential, sequined crossover-pop progenitor and self-described King who died emaciated, caucasian … and strung out on prescription medication.
But last week, as we passed the one-month mark since Michael became omnipresent once more, I finally figured out what I’d like to say to him as he passes into legend. It’s this: Thanks for destroying the record industry! (more…)
Before I wrap up my case against the defendant – that man over there with the plaid sportcoat, golf pants and bad haircut, the one who has refused to wipe that shit-eating grin off his face at any point during these proceedings (or, indeed, during his entire career) – I’d like to congratulate each of you for being selected to pass judgment on the serial crimes committed against rock ‘n’ roll by this defendant, Mr. … Lewis? (Actually, his given name is Hugh Cregg the Third.)
Take a look around you. You, my friends, are the soul of Popdose’s vast readership, the very backbone of music-blog culture! And that makes you – let’s face it – cool. Hip. Happenin’. You are steeped in music history and well-versed in the loose morals and bad attitudes that make rock ‘n’ roll what it is and always has been, at its best: Cutting-edge. Rebellious. Dangerous. You know perfectly well which music lives up to those standards, and which does not. You know which artists have provided major contributions, and you know – perhaps more than anyone – that with a fat recording contract and a complacent rubber-stamp from radio, a swill merchant like Mr. Lewis can do enormous damage to this music, this culture, this … industry of cool in which we are all invested.
And make no mistake – the crimes we’re discussing here are not trivial ones. The defense has tried to convince you that Mr. Lewis was just making “good-time music,” having fun, giving the people what they want. But the fact is that Mr. Lewis and his band, having built their career by stringing together a nice series of hits while presenting themselves as a bunch of regular Joes – a run-of-the-mill bar band made good – proceeded to engage in years of shameless, chart-topping hackery. (more…)
Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing opened in theaters on June 30, 1989, and as he told the Associated Press recently about the film’s controversial climax, “White people still ask me why Mookie threw the [trash] can through the window. Twenty years later, they’re still asking me that. No black person ever, in 20 years, no person of color has ever asked me why.”
Perhaps the white people who’ve asked Lee that question also wondered why black people across the United States celebrated the 1995 acquittal of O.J. Simpson, a famous black football player accused of murdering his white wife. As Todd Boyd, a professor of popular culture at the University of Southern California, noted in the HBO documentary O.J.: A Study in Black and White (2002), the gut reaction boiled down to psychological payback. In other words, for every black man in this country who’s been beaten, lynched, shot, or thrown behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit, you didn’t get this one.
It didn’t have to be O.J., who wasn’t exactly a shining beacon of black pride. And it wasn’t that every black person in America thought he was innocent. But, as Boyd noted on ESPN.com two years ago when discussing Barry Bonds’s home-run record, “acquittal in a court of law was trumped by conviction in the court of public opinion” in the following decade. Now Simpson is behind bars, for armed robbery and kidnapping — the verdict in that 2007 case was handed down exactly 13 years after he was acquitted for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman — and it’d be difficult to believe that the jury wasn’t influenced by the general perception that Simpson had gotten off scot-free in the ’90s.
The black community had a similar, though more muted, reaction when Michael Jackson was found innocent of child molestation in 2005: “the powers that be” had failed to bring down another rich and famous black man who had risen to the top of his profession. (R&B star R. Kelly, who wrote Jackson’s 1995 hit “You Are Not Alone,” was acquitted of 14 counts of child pornography last year. So far, his career hasn’t been affected the way Jackson’s was.) But the biggest musical star of his generation wasn’t a symbol of black pride, either, at least not on the outside: since the mid-’80s his skin color had become lighter and lighter, his hair straighter and straighter, and his nose smaller and smaller due to an overabundance of plastic surgery. In 2002, when he accused his record label, Sony Music, of not supporting its black artists, the standard joke was “Who is this white woman and why is she calling Tommy Mottola a racist?”
Michael Jackson is dead. Those are words that I never thought I’d write, and yet now, a few hours after his death, his body not yet cold, the snide remarks and jokes are coming fast and furious. “Pedophile,” they call him. There are jokes about his nose. The cable station I have on has decided that it’s important to follow the helicopter ferrying Michael’s body from the hospital to the coroner’s office. They want to make sure they get that shot of his body being moved from the chopper to the van. Despicable.
I was around when Elvis Presley died. The more I think about it, the more the similarities are startling. A superstar fades into the twilight, but gains a chance for a comeback. For Elvis it was the Elvis in ‘68 show. For Michael it would have been the 50 sold-out shows at the O2 Arena in London beginning next month. A great entertainer is taken down too young. There are rumors about prescription drugs. People on the inside knew about the problems, but the public was blissfully unaware. A circus begins. Both men destroyed by their fame. An American story that’s all too familiar. For a time, Elvis would have been Michael’s father-in-law. Make no mistake, the death of Michael Jackson is every bit as important, in terms of musical history, as the death of Elvis Presley.
Welcome to the third installment of a continuing series exploring some of the best – and some of the most egregiously wronged – hits of the rock era. A whole lot of hits that only reached pop’s runner-up slot have been largely forgotten; for example, oldies radio seems to have little use for the Poppy Family’s “Which Way You Goin’ Billy?” or BT Express’ “Do It Til You’re Satisfied.” But at least, as I looked back at the 1950s and ’60s, it seemed a healthy proportion of the #2 hits were terrific, or truly important songs that were justifiably blocked by other great singles … or at least got the shaft from idiotic trifles whose momentary appeal was understandable.
But then there was the ’70s – when, as it turned out, most of the hits that broke down during the 199th lap were just as silly and insubstantial as the ones that took the checkered flag. (See how the euphemisms keep on comin’? It remains to be seen whether I can maintain this level of cleverness straight through the Oughts, or whether I’ll pull up lame in the final stretch. See – another one!) Anyway, here we go with 10 good ones from the Me Decade. As always, I’ll list some more #2s at the end, and we can debate their merits in the comments.
10. “YMCA,” the Village People. Be honest: Who would you rather have coming after your children – the innocuous, mustachioed and very gay Village People, or “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy”-era Rod Stewart? Well, if you answered Rod, you got your wish in the winter of ’79, as he pulled a Kris Allen on everyone’s favorite bunch of costumed Adam Lamberts and bogarted #1 for four weeks. As for the other 99.9 percent of us, we can take delight in the fact that the last time we heard “Do Ya Think,” we were able to fast-forward through it on the TiVo during the American Idol finale – while you get to dance along to “YMCA” (though not this remix) during every single professional baseball game ever. So there.
9. “Live and Let Die,” Wings. Why did Paul McCartney’s Bond theme fail to reach the pinnacle? Maybe because it’s mostly an instrumental? Nah… (Edgar Winter’s “Frankenstein” had topped the chart just a couple months earlier.) Perhaps because nobody cared much about its host film? As if! (Live and Let Die topped the box office through much of June and July 1973, and was the 10th-biggest film of the year.) Perchance were there simply better songs out at the time? Well, the three (three!) songs that leaped over Roger Moore’s speedboat were Maureen McGovern’s “The Morning After,” fresh off its Poseidon Adventure Oscar victory; Diana Ross’ diva anthem “Touch Me in the Morning”; and Stories’ cover of Hot Chocolate’s “Brother Louie.” So I’d argue, no, that wasn’t it either. (Here’s the original version of the last song, which far less obviously references the Kingsmen.) Personally, I’d like to think that radio still had Macca in the penalty box for turning out so much crap over the past two years, up to and including his previous single “My Love” – one of the Worst #1 Songs of the ’70s. (more…)
If you’ve ever ventured into that thicket of sweetness and stress known as Planning A Wedding, you’ve probably at least considered buying one (or five) of those awful compilations of “wedding music.” They come in all sorts of flavors – classical, country, Contemporary Christian, pop standards, classic R&B – and they’ve got icky titles like A Day to Remember, or Songs That Say “I Love You.” They tend to feature a lot of the same songs, like “Always and Forever,” and “Three Times a Lady,” and “Wonderful Tonight,” and Pachelbel’s Canon, and “The Way You Look Tonight,” and that horrible Boyz II Men song “On Bended Knee.” And, just like the Book of Common Prayer, they’re all diabolically designed to make your nuptials sound just like everybody else’s.
My wife Gwen and I wed 15 years ago today, and to celebrate that occasion – along with the onset of the June wedding season – I thought I’d give Popdose’s loyal readers an anniversary present: a mixtape of wedding songs and stories from some of our columnists, and an opportunity to share your own remembrances and ideas in the comments. These songs aren’t your garden-variety bridal standards; in fact, a few of them are downright bizarre. But even if you don’t find them suitable for your own purposes the next time you get hitched, hopefully they’ll inspire you and your betrothed to follow your own muse, and not some music conglomerate’s. Click here for a compressed file of all the tracks featured here, and read on! (more…)
Welcome to the second installment of an ongoing series celebrating songs that fell excruciatingly short of ascending to the top of Billboard’s pop singles chart. In the course of compiling and monitoring responses to the series’ first column a couple weeks ago, I learned a number of things, the most important of which were:
1. Unbeknownst to me as I wrote about the #2 hits of the ’50s – and in the process wrote the snappy sentence, “You don’t see Fred Bronson compiling five editions of The Billboard Book of #2 Hits, do you?” – it turns out that a Billboard Book of Number 2 Hits was indeed published in 2000. I have chosen to invoke the Pelosi defense: I was misled by the book’s obscurity into thinking it didn’t exist. My case is bolstered by the facts that Bronson had nothing to do with it (some fella named Christopher Feldman wrote it), and that the book went out of print without ever reaching a second edition. So, ha! You may read much of it on Google Books or buy a copy at Amazon Marketplace, or you may purchase a digital copy for the Amazon Kindle. (Don’t everybody run out all at once to blow $359 on a Kindle.) Needless to say, I didn’t use Feldman’s book as a reference in the first column; I make no such promises from here on out.
2. As I slog through six decades’ worth of fodder for future editions of this column, I’m going to have to dig deep for euphemisms that put some pizzazz behind the idea of a song being kept out of the #1 slot by another song. I believe that my low point in the last column came in the teaser for this one, when I left the distinct impression that Smokey Robinson might once have been “cock-blocked” by Lawrence Welk (see #4 below). Whoever the object of Smokey’s thwarted affections might have been in such a scenario, I am now convinced that at no time was Welk ever involved in blocking Smokey’s cock, and I apologize for the inference.
As a reminder, we’re giving extra weight to hits by artists who never reached #1, to songs that were far superior to the rivals that overtook them on the charts, and to plain old great songs that deserved the extra glory that the top of the Hot 100 brings. I’ll follow my choices with a list of other #2 hits of the decade, and we can debate their merits in the comments section. Now, on with the countdown!
11. “She’s Not There,” the Zombies. Keyboardist/songwriter Rod Argent made the Top 10 four times between 1964 and ’72 – three as leader of the Zombies, before he got greedy and named his next band after himself. Colin Blumstone sang lead for the Zombies, and just as his vocals offered more nuance than most of his early-British Invasion counterparts, “She’s Not There” was an awfully sophisticated single for an era when even the Beatles were still cranking out “I Feel Fine” and “Eight Days a Week.” Sadly, “She’s Not There” was left knocking on #1’s door while Bobby Vinton came through the window with “Mr. Lonely.” Even more annoying, Vinton’s hit version used the exact same backing track as Buddy Greco’s #64 smash of two years before! That’s just not right. (more…)
Last year, in the midst of compiling my “Worst Number One Songs of the Rock Era” series, I began contemplating the sad, sorry fate of those records that have come up just short of the top slot on Billboard’s pop charts. After all, nobody celebrates even the greatest, or biggest-selling, #2 hit as a colossal achievement, the same way even the worst #1 hit ever (“Honey”?) is honored. You don’t see Fred Bronson compiling five editions of The Billboard Book of Number 2 Hits, do you?
Put it this way: “Waiting for a Girl like You” sat at #2 for 10 weeks in 1981, behind a bunch of fat guys doing aerobics. “I Want to Know What Love Is” got to #1 for two weeks in 1985. A quarter-century later, which song is considered Foreigner’s biggest hit?
So, beginning this week we honor some of those great songs that, for whatever reason, never got that Casey Kasem drumroll on American Top 40. And when I say “for whatever reason,” I mean it: Sure, many times a single has simply been blocked by a bigger, better rival, but heaven knows there have been plenty of payola/cocaine/label/radio shenanigans through the years that have kept a deserving song from ascending to glory. As I explored last year, the Top 40 has never been a perfect beast; who knows how many times a single has gotten stuck at #2 because some program director’s girlfriend just adored those cute Osmond boys?
Today we start with five singles that never reached the top during the post-“Rock Around the Clock” 1950s. But first, a brief explanation of my methodology for including records in this survey. Initial choices were based on quality; if one’s first response to a song title is “I can’t believe that didn’t make it to #1,” or if a #2 single seems (in retrospect) infinitely better than the song that screwed it out of the top spot, it’s here. Beyond that, over the course of the survey I’ll feature some singles that topped out at #2 during the latter stages of another song’s extended run in the top spot, figuring things might have been different if it weren’t for some amount of programming inertia at radio. After I identify my picks for each decade, I’ll list some other #2s and open the comments section for debate on who got shafted the worst.
There was a period of time during junior high and high school when I was convinced music wouldn’t be a part of my life. I couldn’t afford to get a guitar or a keyboard, I didn’t have the outsize personality the other rock kids had, and I found it terribly difficult to put across my ambitions to even the few people I entrusted with my goals. I focused more on the possibility of going into comics. Just as some of my earliest recollections are of songs, I also have an undiminished affinity for Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang. In those high school years my attention was fixed on the artist Al Williamson, whose superrealistic, detailed style was so perfect in the notorious EC science-fiction comics of the late ’50s and early ’60s. In my mind, his work on Marvel’s adaptation of The Empire Strikes Back and his subsequent work on the Star Wars newspaper strip are the epitome of great comic book art.
In the past month I’ve been rooting through the boxes in my attic, looking at the stuff I’ve squirreled away up there over the years. I came upon a small cache of drawings, paintings, and such, gave them a once-over, and decided maybe it was a good idea to bring them downstairs and get some quality scans together, just to have a decent record of their existence. I doodle from time to time, but my dreams of being in the business of comics are long gone. This is partly due to the quality of what’s out there, specifically the writing. In the past two decades Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, and Frank Miller have made that once unimaginable leap from the “funny books” to honest-to-God literature, and they didn’t even have to change their addresses. With the often funny but deeply felt Bone saga, Jeff Smith made a brilliant epic out of something that might have been relegated to a goofy kids’-comic limbo at one time. And then there’s Jon J. Muth’s insanely awesome adaptation of Fritz Lang’s M. Each example not only deserves space on the snootiest of bookshelves, but some deserve to kick a few warhorses off those shelves just for breathing room.
I promised myself that I wouldn’t do it – that I wouldn’t dive into the already overcrowded waters of Michael Jackson obituary, hagiography and/or armchair autopsy. I managed to keep that promise for a whole month – primarily because I didn’t have a coherent “take” on Michael’s life or his death. Yet here I find myself … inevitably, inescapably, if about five weeks late.
![RS430~Huey-Lewis-Rolling-Stone-no-430-September-1984-Posters[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/RS430Huey-Lewis-Rolling-Stone-no-430-September-1984-Posters1.jpg "RS430~Huey-Lewis-Rolling-Stone-no-430-September-1984-Posters[1]")
Take a look around you. You, my friends, are the soul of Popdose’s vast readership, the very backbone of music-blog culture! And that makes you – let’s face it – cool. Hip. Happenin’. You are steeped in music history and well-versed in the loose morals and bad attitudes that make rock ‘n’ roll what it is and always has been, at its best: Cutting-edge. Rebellious. Dangerous. You know perfectly well which music lives up to those standards, and which does not. You know which artists have provided major contributions, and you know – perhaps more than anyone – that with a fat recording contract and a complacent rubber-stamp from radio, a swill merchant like Mr. Lewis can do enormous damage to this music, this culture, this … industry of cool in which we are all invested.
Perhaps the white people who’ve asked Lee that question also wondered why black people across the United States celebrated the 1995 acquittal of O.J. Simpson, a famous black football player accused of murdering his white wife. As Todd Boyd, a professor of popular culture at the University of Southern California, noted in the HBO documentary O.J.: A Study in Black and White (2002), the gut reaction boiled down to psychological payback. In other words, for every black man in this country who’s been beaten, lynched, shot, or thrown behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit, you didn’t get this one.
11. 
In the past month I’ve been rooting through the boxes in my attic, looking at the stuff I’ve squirreled away up there over the years. I came upon a small cache of drawings, paintings, and such, gave them a once-over, and decided maybe it was a good idea to bring them downstairs and get some quality scans together, just to have a decent record of their existence. I doodle from time to time, but my dreams of being in the business of comics are long gone. This is partly due to the quality of what’s out there, specifically the writing. In the past two decades Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, and Frank Miller have made that once unimaginable leap from the “funny books” to honest-to-God literature, and they didn’t even have to change their addresses. With the often funny but deeply felt 
. Each example not only deserves space on the snootiest of bookshelves, but some deserve to kick a few warhorses off those shelves just for breathing room.