The Number Fortys: Joyce Kennedy & Jeffrey Osborne - "The Last Time I Made Love"

In The Number Fortys, we review whatever song was sitting at #40 on the Billboard charts. We began in the first week of January 1984, right around the time this writer became cognizant/obsessive about music, and will continue until we get bored. 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). Also, if you want to read the Number in the title as meaning "more numb," I think that's totally understandable at this point.

Remember when they used to have to call it "making love." I think I speak for everyone when I say, ick. As for this song, well, I guess people had to listen to something back in 1984 when they were fucking (excuse me, making love).

I guess maybe the difference between fucking and making love is that making love is supposed to go really slow? Because this song is slow as hell. This sounds more like going to sleep than fucking, or making love, or doin' the old pokey-pokey (a term I just made up). Let's imagine a song called "The Last Time I Did the Old Pokey-Pokey. Is that a better song? Why yes, I believe it is.

So this song is about the last time they made love... to each other, and how beautiful it was. Seems like a waste of a title that could have gone in a number of different directions.

The last time I made love...I was attacked by a flurry of locusts.
The last time I made love...was awesome. It was right before my dick fell off.
The last time I made love...I was in a brothel in Wichita.
The last time I made love...it was with my sister.

You get the idea. This though, this is just an embarrassing Hallmark card set to insipid music. This is the second time this blog has encountered Jeffrey Osborne. That song got a 6. This one gets a 2.

At least it has a nice message re: women's sexual satisfaction etc., though even that aspect of the song makes me a little uncomfortable for the way it portrays female sexuality as passive and rooted in kindness (so much like mommy!). But since most songs about sex back then (and back now, for that matter) didn't give the women any agency at all, I guess I'll cut the song some slack and say, fuck it.

Or, as the song would say, make love it.

THE NUMBER ONE

Even if people one day decide to cancel Prince, and there are plenty of reasons why people would want to, I can't believe anyone could ever cancel this. It is one of the most life-affirming pieces of music ever made. A song about joy that looks death right in the eye and laughs at it. The singer is excited by the fact that we are all gonna die. Because if we are all gonna die then we have absolute freedom. That's some radical shit to send to the top of the charts with a multi-gender, multi-hued, multi-genred band of weirdos. A song about wanting everything "to go wrong" because it means the party, and our existence on the planet, will be so much greater and more exciting, is the sound of true enlightenment, a freedom that would be dangerous if people actually understood it and took it to heart.

Let's remove the song from the singer, the person who wrote and imagined it. Because that guy didn't come close to living this out. He was a control freak who lashed out in anger and brooding silence if things didn't go exactly the way they were supposed to go. But this song. This song is glorious.

Score: 10.