Number Ones

Sampled at ten-year intervals over the last three decades, the summer’s number one singles present an appalling index of failure. This week in 1981, during Newt Gingrich’s second term in the House, Kim Carnes’ nine-week campout at #1 with “Bette Davis Eyes” —interrupted for one week by Stars on 45’s Beatles/Archies medley before Carnes regained the summit—was terminally upset by Air Supply’s “The One That You Love.” It’s hard listening: Russell Hitchcock shrills Graham Russell’s “lyrics” over enema piano and emetic strings in a maudlin, scatological orgy of self-pity that puts GG Allin to shame. During the chorus, it’s as if the string players’ bows are abrading your pancreas and embedding horsehair in your every gland, and Hitchcock is painting on your body with his shit. The incoherent words, addressed to a hastily leaving lover, are a compost of casual narcissisms, small regrets, empty promises: “Must we end this way / When so much here is hard to lose,” “I promise this one will go slow, oh / We have the right to know,” etc.

Minority Whip Newt Gingrich was on a fundraising tour in the summer of ’91, when Paula Abdul’s “Rush Rush” made a five-week stand at the top of the chart. Everyone old enough remembers the Rebel Without A Cause music video with Keanu Reeves, but who can remember a single line from the song? Songwriter Peter Lord’s lyrics are so banal they resist the understanding: “You’re the whisper of a summer breeze / You’re the kiss that puts my soul at ease.” Just as foreigners Stars on 45 and Air Supply had targeted Kim Carnes ten years before, engaging in calculated hostilities against our American way of life, English mercenaries EMF dispatched “Rush Rush” to history’s shitcan with “Unbelievable.” Happily, with the next decade’s ad campaign for Natural Cheese Crumbles, Kraft Foods straight jacked this Madchester Trojan Horse and ghost rode that bitch through the public street for Uncle Sam.

Usher’s “U Remind Me” topped the chart in July 2001, when Newt was a disgraced former Speaker on his third wife. The tune is merry enough, the arrangement breezy enough, but Usher’s had it up to 5’8¼” with your shit behavior. You remind him of his ex, who was “sexing everyone but [him],” so he “just can’t get with you.” Not Usher’s best, but it’s the Sistine Chapel of sound compared to this week’s #1, LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem,” released in the wake of Newt’s nomination as the Republican candidate to be president of shit. In this song, there’s no boys, no girls, just two rich dickheads from Pacific Palisades talking about themselves. The Gordys’ rhymes would embarrass a child—“Stop! Hating is bad”—and the music is the sound of stupid people fucking, a sentimental whine up top and decerebrated electro porkbeat below, produced with the dynamic range of a continuous wet fart. The real reason the song is a hit is that while the rest of us huff refrigerant in narrow alleyways behind high-stakes mah-jongg games or smoke primos on the hot asphalt outside Big Lots in front of God, the sheriff and everybody, these two claim to be drinking top shelf booze and telling hos to strip for them. More likely they’re sipping beet juice at some New Age raw foodery and watching Wayne Dyer seminar presentations on their iPads, but I’ll grant that it’s an alluring fantasy, the fantasy of having money to buy alcohol. Sweetening the beverage, “Party Rock Anthem” incorporates a cleaned-up version of the vocal hook from Rick Ross’s “Hustlin’”—“Everyday I’m hustlin’”—replacing the offending word with “shufflin’.” For the kids, who need to know about the great feeling of 1980s pop music—which obviously represents the ultimate horizon of creative achievement—without the negativity. Motown wouldn’t have crossed the street to piss on this song, the nadir of pop’s continuous downward trend to date.

MOE BISHOP

Previously - No, I Don't Like "Real" Hip-Hop