The Number Fortys: Robin Gibb - "Boys Do Fall In Love"

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).

The video here, set 100 years in a future where people watch videos on DVDs, is a massive what-the-fuck-fest. But that probably wasn't Robin's fault, so let's just try to focus on the song. Wait, did he just say something about making love to a paper moon? Maybe we should focus on something else. Cool steal of the pre-chorus from Neil Diamond's Cracklin' Rosie though.

Robin Gibb was one of the BeeGees, and so what if he looks like a lizard. We all have our physical flaws, right?

Let's try the music again. The arrangement is uninspired. That four note synth hook during the pre-chorus is so cliched and predictable, it's a joke. The chorus isn't bad, but even the stutter B-b-b-boys feels second-hand, like someone read a Songwriting for Dummies book (not around then, I know--whatever the 1984 equivalent was then) and saw a bullet point that read, "repeating the consonant sound at the beginning of your title is also a way to create a memorable hook, and one that your audience won't be expecting."

The lyrics are nonsense. The whole premise of the song is nonsense. I think we all know that boys fall in love. I suppose we could read a gay subtext into the lyrics. If we assume the woman/girl in the song is trying to persuade the boy that it's okay for the boy to fuck her (they make love / they get love on a Saturday night), but the boy is reluctant because he is still wrestling with his sexuality, or maybe he hasn't come to terms with it yet, or maybe he doesn't even realize what's going on, if we assume all of that then I could see where the song would somehow take on a more poignant meaning.

But then we'd be doing work that the song itself was too lazy to do. Fuck this song. It gets a 2.


THE NUMBER ONE

When people talk about 1984 (or 1983, but I'm partial to 1984) as one of the great years for pop music, you have to understand that this was the #1 song of the entire year. And any form of mass market art/entertainment that can throw up something as strange and moving and futuristic as this, and have it become the most popular song in the world, it's almost enough to make you believe that life under capitalism is the best of all possible worlds.

Stuff like When Doves Cry (and pretty much everything on Dirty Mind, all of Purple Rain except the title track--it's fine in the context of the album, but doing Journey better than Journey is pretty much the definition of an artistic pyrrhic victory--and scattered tracks throughout the 80's) is why I find all that NPG-era stuff, and half of Sign O' the Times unlistenable we-think-we're-funky-but-we-sound-like-a-late-night-house-band dreck. Prince was a polymath genius that he did his best work when pushed outside his comfort zone (I wonder what this button does). That is to say, the more experimental he got, the more stunning pop music he made, because his pop instincts were so sound that he couldn't help making pop. When he fell back on his musical equivalent of comfort food--James Brown, 70's R&B, all he did was make inferior versions of those. Even the decent songs from that period aren't recognizably Prince, whereas everything he did from 1980-84 was so distinctive that you could recognize it without him ever opening his mouth.

Anyway, this song is a 10. And as long as we're expounding on Mr. Nelson, here's an example of a throwaway on the back end of his 1982 double album that still sounds like it came from the future. It's a 9, and it makes stuff on his 1988 double album, songs like Housequake and Play in the Sunshine, sound totally fucking quaint in comparison.