Todd Duncan sings “Unchained Melody”The Righteous Brothers “Unchained Melody”
Before the Righteous Brothers’ hernia-busting exertions made this song an unholy institution, it appeared in one: Chino, in the prison drama Unchained (1955). The tune, sung by Todd Duncan, was just like all the schmaltz that gets nominated for Best Song at the Oscars® every year, except it made listeners think of getting fucked up the ass in the shower. However, it wasn’t until 1957 that “Jailhouse Rock” made prison sex a legitimate topic for a pop song. The country wasn’t ready, so “Unchained Melody” lost to “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing” at the Academy Awards that year.
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The Righteous Brothers, “Unchained Melody”A decade later, two perverts from California’s Orange County unleashed their most sadistic fantasies on the song, and the airwaves have never been the same since. Anyone old enough to read these words has heard the Righteous Brothers’ frankly pornographic reading of “Unchained Melody” at least one thousand times, and lost a little humanity with every listen. Keyboard arpeggios twitch like a tortured prostate, guitars thud sickeningly, strings spray the chords with ejaculate, and singer Bobby Hatfield busts a gut straining to outdo the sheer obscenity of the arrangement with his lewdest castrato notes. It is a scene out of a Roman orgy.Hatfield and his partner in the Righteous Brothers, Bill Medley, were not brothers in the fraternal or ethnic sense. But could they have been brothers in the sense that they were bound by an occult pact of unspeakable wickedness? You be the judge. The romantic comedy Ghost (1990), starring the hilarious Whoopi Goldberg, revived the Brothers’ recording of “Unchained Melody” for a whole new generation of depraved cruelty-lovers, ensuring that it would be played everywhere, at all times, forever. Bobby Hatfield died of a cocaine overdose in a Michigan hotel room in 2003, while the Righteous Brothers were on tour.
Commodores “Brick House”
In 1977, the Commodores released this tribute to a woman who not only has tits, but also an ass, built like a brick shithouse. If only the song had been as sturdily constructed. Unfortunately for anyone who has ever had to wait on hold, stand in line, or share an office, unlicensed contractors botched this job and left the public holding the bag. With its cracked laminate, faulty plumbing, and leaky ceilings, this sonic tenement is unfit even by the standards of the malnourished family of immigrants that huddles within, sucking on stolen bread mold.Drummer Walter “Clyde” Orange’s vocal performance has its moments, but unfortunately none of these occur during the chorus, which makes up damn near 100 percent of the song. Like Kings of Leon’s no less abominable “On Call,” released 30 years later, the hook of “Brick House” is two notes repeated over and over with identical tone and phrasing, down to the yawning glissando on the word “house.” It is the melodic equivalent of the HeadOn commercial. That might be fine if there were anything happening musically to keep the brain alive, but the Commodores play as if they’re at a job interview, and they wear their polite groove pretty thin over the song’s six minutes. Something called Wilson and Alroy’s Record Reviews says this is “perhaps the low-down funkiest sex song of all time,” from which I deduce that both Wilson and Alroy are 100 years old.Previously – Pink Floyd Was Laughing at You