[Note: pretty much every link on this page is SFW. Go ahead. However, if you play them in your office your co-workers will demand an explanation or (probably correctly) out you as a geezer who pre-dates Seattle Grunge.]
So that backfired!
[For those of you who just tuned in, I Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” recently established an earworm beachhead in my skull. The single word “eclipse” had done it. Everyone knows you can’t kill an earworm but, for reasons which elude modern science, it’ll you can plant it in someone else’s head and run like hell. So I wrote a 1,400 word rant to exorcise it. It worked! I had a blissful earworm free evening. Then things went pear shaped! Follow if you dare.]
It began with a commenter who linked to Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart”.
Guiltily I’ll admit I sorta’ like that song. It’s a guilty pleasure at best. It’s over-orchestrated, overwrought, over produced, and almost a parody of itself. But I liked it when I was young and as the ’97 New Beetle proved, we’re all soft about our youthful influences. So I can live with it.
I hadn’t, however, seen the video. In my youth I listened to it on a “Boom Box” (a technology that held sway until Apple killed it with iNinjas). No screen on a boom box so no bullshit. Just the ability to rattle windows and drain D-Cells by the dozen. Also when I was a kid… we actually played outdoors. Amazing how the past is different.
Was there anything more American, than 65 dials and switches shoved into a deafening wad of batteries and speakers. I love my culture!
The video, on the other hand, is precisely why the 1980’s were shit. It has very large hair and an inexplicable blend of cougar based homo-eroticism, and a boarding school. If you missed it; perhaps you are too young to remember the 1980s, or maybe you spent that decade drunk, or perhaps you spent it hiding in a bunker waiting for the Russkies to vaporize us all… you should watch it. Consider it a cultural foray into why the past wasn’t all good.
I commented on the Bonnie Tyler video experience:
“What. The. Fuck. Is. Going. On. In. That. Video.
Did I just spend five minutes watching a cougar with ’80’s hair having an ecstasy freak out at the young gay men’s athletic club and religious cult boarding school?”
Almost immediately I was presented with the “Literal Translation Version“, which is pure brilliance! (A salute to commenter Phssthpok for 5:33 of concentrated awesome.) You must see it! (Ideally watch it after you see the original. You’ll kill 10 minutes total but what the hell else are you doing right now?)
Meanwhile, my brain dodged Cheeseburgers and Lawyers. Nice try folks but I cannot be swayed by Jimmy Buffet or Warren Zevon. (Zevon’s lyrics remind me that somewhere there are poor bastards that had to raise young members of the Bush and Kennedy clans and they certainly got those sorts of calls.)
Just as the dust settled, Tennessee Budd fired this:
“MacArthur’s Park is melting in the dark
All the sweet green icing flowing down….”
It meant nothing to me. I playfully sent off Strawberry Alarm Clock’s “Incense and Peppermints“, which I like so much I don’t mind when it “earworms” (to coin a verb).
Little did I know that MacArthur Park would hit me like a nuclear bomb!
Folks, this is important. MacArthur Park is the name of that goddamn “Cake in the rain” song. It’s the weaponized smallpox of earworms. If I’d associated MacArthur Park with the brutal, unrelenting, schmatlzy, death blow that is the Cake song… I would not only have refused to click the link… I’d have set my computer on fire.
I’m putting the link below but I’m serious about this… don’t fuck with the Cake Song… it’ll earworm your ass into the stone age. You’ve been warned:
That first video is just plain weird.
Here’s some Weird Al to go with the last video. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gh4zvQfDhi0
The Weird Al version, about Jurassic Park, was my very first exposure to that tune at all, and by the grace of God still vastly outnumbers the plays of the original. Its worth a listen.
That last one is earwormy alright.
It’s a kind of magic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p_1QSUsbsM
Grins evilly.
Freddy sure has an overbite doesn’t he?
This song is pure ’80’s and I loved it as a teenager.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKdknYaSHgE
John Denver and Cass Elliott
The literal version of the “Safety Dance” is pure win as well. https://youtu.be/Yi7mBzdDHyY
Despite sounding similar and sharing half the words in common, the “Safety Dance” and the “Safety Briefing” are entirely different things and should never be confused as that can be quite embarrassing at an 0700 assembly.
Or so I’ve heard….
Ha ha ha… I wish I’d thought of that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPNDBEuKCdY
By Coven
I fucking loved the ’80’s. Be nice to us ’80’s kids or we’ll sic zombie Reagan on you!
Dockrin….
You are Evil. I LIKE it!
We’re having a contest for the biggest earworm for you. We are just trying to help ya out 🙂
https://bar.baen.com/index.php?t=msg&th=138578&start=0&
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xBnivXp0fA
(and the cadence that many of your readers might recall:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv_k6rW9ec0
To Absent Comrades!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDl8ZPm3GrU
A classic earworm…
Glad I could be of service!
I’ve always actually liked “Total Eclipse” as well.
and one last one….Classic Muppets!
I’ll see your classic Sesame Street, and raise you a classic Sesame Street edited for modern sensibilities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-Wd-Q3F8KM
That’s getting it’s own post! Probably this weekend. Thanks!
After I heard William Shatner’s version of the Evil Cake Song (gonna call it that forever) I wanted to run an ice pick into my ears. I’ll not link to it, I may be a mean sonofabitch but I’m not evil.
Thank you… that schmaltzy song done by Shatner would be inhuman.
Oh, there’s worse/better things that Shatner has done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1Ar79f8aN8
How about Total Eclipse of the Heart cover shot during the eclipse?
I honestly don’t know any other songs Bonnie Tyler sang besides Total Eclipse Of The Heart. I like it, I’m a sucker for a power ballad. The video is just weird.
It’s interesting that her voice we know today was a result of vocal injury requiring surgery. Piercing, gristly, powerful and at the same time a very seductive voice.
The only one I can think of is “I Need A Hero” which I dimly recall as just as over-orchestrated as “Total Eclipse Of The Heart”. Power ballad is the right word.
I had no idea she’d had surgery. I thought the husky voice was from smoking and/or belting out huge songs.
Just some of that useless knowledge I picked up from one of those Decade In Review radio shows. It’s way down there on her Wikipedia entry, right below all her hits in Sweden and other parts of the European continent. No mention of Swedish Disco (or squirrels) thankfully.
For a good video of ‘Holding out for a hero’, see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mher704il6I
This one has been rattling around off and on inside my head for a couple of years:
https://youtu.be/b28URAtaxeA
Creepy!
thats one word to describe it. Disturbing is the first one that come to my mind.
As a former HS Band geek, I have to recommend the Stan Kenton instrumental version of MacArthur Park. Horns are WAAAAY better than vocals.