We’ve reached the end of the longest letter we’ve had in a while, and we leave it in style — and/or a pile of adult-contemporary crap. Take your pick. Enjoy the final week of the letter M as you listen to a lot more from the ass end of the Billboard Hot 100 chart during the 1980s.
Michael Morales
“I Don’t Know” — 1989, #81 (download)
If you type “Michael Morales” into Wikipedia, you’ll get the profile of some convicted murderer. Now, the musician known as Michael Morales may have been pretty crappy, but the only thing he’s murdered are my eardrums. (Ba-dum-bump! Here all night, folks!)
In the world of Top 40 hits there are very few songs I would consider obscure, but Morales’s first two singles might fall into that category. In 1989 “Who Do You Give Your Love To?” went to #14, and his second, a cover of the Romantics’ “What I Like About You,” went to #28. Then “I Don’t Know” dropped, and you know what — I don’t know if I’ve ever heard Morales’s actual vocals. All three of these songs are so layered, processed, and fake sounding that I feel like I’m listening to a machine instead of a human. But if his vocals were so bad that they needed to be that processed, how did he ever get a deal in the first place? “What I Like About You” would go down as my least favorite cover song of the decade if it weren’t for Roger’s (Troutman) mind-melting 1981 cover of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.”
Meli’sa Morgan
“Do Me Baby” — 1986, #46 (download)
It was a nice, cool night in 2006 when I came home from work and quietly ran into the record room without my girlfriend noticing. I put “Do Me Baby,” still in the picture sleeve, on top of the turntable. As I was unpacking my stuff from work, I asked her to go into the room and put on this new Prince cover I’d gotten because I thought she’d like it.
She told me to do it myself.
After a few more tries, I finally convinced her to go into the record room. When she picked up the 45, underneath it was a diamond ring.
Yes, I got engaged to Meli’sa Morgan’s cover of Prince’s “Do Me Baby.” A romantic at heart, I am.
Check out the video with Sadao Watanabe on saxophone:
