Not that it matters whether a song does, or does not, reach #1. Or if it even reaches the charts at all. That stuff is so arbitrary, and dependent on factors that have nothing at all to do with the quality, or lack thereof, in the actual music itself, that any quantitative method of evaluating art is inherently meaningless. And yea, and yet, people who have been given money to write about music will cite streaming numbers to support their claim that a song, or an artist, is somehow more important than another.
But getting back to Billy, like most people around my age who got into underground music in the late 80s, I felt that mainstream 80s sounds were synthetic and fake. I totally bought into the narrative that the closer a recording sounded to people in a room, the more real it was (you can read real in quotes if you want). Paula Abdul was fake. The Smiths were real. One sang about things that were fake (real love), and one sang about things that were real (fake love). I carried this prejudice against 80s mainstream production nearly a decade into the 21st century until someone put this song on at work one day. By now I was listening to avant-garde electronic music, and that opening flurry of electronics--that droning synth into the exploding stabs of sound--came across so glorious that I started laughing. Then the song kicked in with a horsey beat so obvious that someone had Billy riding a horse in the video, and, uh, holy shit.
I have never heard 80s music the same way since.
Loverboy isn't just a sonic delight. The pre-chorus (starts at 1:12 if you don't know what a pre-chorus is) floors me every time, the way it just keep ratcheting up the tension. Billy sings the shit out of it. He sounds genuinely anguished, and the "yeah-yeah"s as he arrives at the chorus are so ecstatic that they manage to evoke the beauty and the euphoria of frustrated lust as well as, say, The Smiths ever did.
Billy plays it cool for the chorus, supported by stop-start distorted guitars.You have to love how he spends the verses/pre-chorus working himself into a frenzy, only to hit the chorus and just croon Want to be your... loverboy. Compare the smooth control when he sings "yeah" in the chorus to the unhinged "yeah"s in the pre-chorus.
We're all set up for your typical guitar solo, but instead we get what is essentially a technology solo made up of scratching, samples that are so randomly placed as to sound avant-garde. It brings the song to a thrilling stop like a train slamming into a wall over and over again. The noise subsides and we get a quiet verse, now with that guitar solo. But the verse is shortened to get us to the pre-chorus faster, this time even more unhinged than before, and then the chorus arrives and--
Billy drops out, the song and these near-falsetto voices sing the chorus and it's all just so dramatic and cool. It's the finest moment of Billy Ocean's musical life. And a couple of years later when I made an "Eightiesbilly" mix that had songs from that decade by Idol, Joel, and Ocean, you'd better believe this song was prominently featured.
Score: 10.
THE NUMBER ONE
We get two outstanding time capsules of 80s production for the price of one in this installment of The Number Fortys. Out of Touch features all kinds of cutting edge digital sampling, to the point where this song resembles the Art of Noise (less than a year old at this point) as much as Hall & Oates. They brought in Arthur Baker to help with the sonics. Baker had already worked on visionary early 80s stuff like Afrika Bambaataa's Planet Rock (it's a 9), and Freeze's I.O.U. (an 8), and credit to H & O for recognizing the coolness of what he was doing.
Of course being songwriting pros, H & O fashion a genuine moving, anguished melody/lyrics about the draining soullessness of decadence. This was a theme that a more respected writer like Elvis Costello had covered extensively a few years prior, and it says a lot about H & O that their song holds its own lyrically while incorporating avant-gardeish sonics makes a serious case for their artistic credentials--especially compared to a musical reactionary like E. Costello.
Score: 9.
No comments:
Post a Comment