The Number Fortys: The Go-Go's "Turn to You"

In The Number Fortys, we review every song that was sitting at #40 on the Billboard chats, starting in the first week of January 1984, right around the time this writer became cognizant/obsessive about music. The seeds for the idea came from Tom Breihan's Number Ones column over at Stereogum. However, we here at k-postpunk believe that the bottom is more interesting than the top (and obscurity is more interesting than either).

By 1984, The Go-Go's were a fucking mess. Drug addictions and personality conflict plagued the band. They had just released their third album in four years, Talk Show. The previous two had gone Top 10, and spawned three hit singles, including Our Lips are Sealed (an 8), We Got the Beat (a 9), and Vacation (a 9). Not only were they the first female rock band to have a #1 album, but they were a fucking fantastic live band, with a really, really good drummer. In honor of that, I'm going to post a live version of this song.

 

This was the second single off Talk Show. The first was the glorious Head Over Heels, a song about the fast pace of being in a successful rock band that covers the subject better than nearly every song in that well-traveled genre. It's a 10.

As for Turn to You, it's a song that gets over on the strength of the performance. The song itself (meaning lyrics & melody) isn't much more than generic power pop, but god what a performance. This song's last 30 to 45 seconds, the way they go into the breakdown, and then come out of the breakdown into a frenzy, that kind of thing doesn't happen by accident. This was a very smart, very talented band that could take their straightfoward pop/rock to places that more respected 60's pop/rock-inspired artists like,say, Tom Petty never got to (because The Go-Go's had been touched by punk, and Tom spent his life seemingly unaware that it happened).

For all that though, there's not much else going on here, and by the time I heard this song more than five times, I have a feeling the catchiness of that chorus would start to become excruciating. The recorded version of Turn to You is a 4. That version up there is a 6.

Talk Show would be their last album for 17 years. Singer Belinda Carlisle would have lots of hits (Mad About You is an 8; the rest of her solo career is a 2). Jane Wiedlin would have one hit (Rush Hour is a 7--maybe we'll catch up with it in 1988). I suppose the band member who was addicted to heroin had a lot of hits as well, but we're not counting those kind here.

THE NUMBER ONE

I have a feeling this is going to be #1 for a while. We went deep on it in the last installment when it first showed up (go find the link yourself). It's still a 10. It's so much a 10 that it's unfortunate other songs can also be a 10. It and Cyndi Lauper's Time After Time are easily the two best #1s we've come across so far.