(14) CAPTAIN & TENNILLE, ”MUSKRAT LOVE”
creeped by
(12) CHARLENE, “I’VE NEVER BEEN TO ME”
to win the march badness championship
507-359

we congratulate the victors
elena passarello
and the legendary, legendarily bad, and legendarily great,
captain and tennille!

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on April 1.

NO MATTER WHERE YOU GO, THERE YOU ARE: ZOË BOSSIERE ON “I’VE NEVER BEEN TO ME”

I had hoped to internalize the music. To listen to Charlene’s one-hit wonder on repeat until the lyrics settled deep down into the recesses of my brain, where bad songs and useless information go to be preserved for all eternity. To listen until, maybe, I even liked it a little bit in spite of myself.
In the months between selecting “I’ve Never Been to Me” for this tournament last July and when these words were written, I’ve cued the song up on Spotify and YouTube more times than I can count. I listened to multiple different versions by several artists to break up the monotony of Charlene’s breathy refrain; I played it in situations where I would not be able to leave, such as while taking a shower or behind the wheel of a car; I forced myself to muscle through the song for the sake of art, a la Geoff Dyer in Out of Sheer Rage. But invariably, by the third or fourth repeat, I’d rip off my headphones in a sweaty desperation, reaching a point where I couldn’t get through the song one more time. Not even for another second. By November, this ritual of failing to listen to, let alone write about, “I’ve Never Been to Me” was beginning to get under my skin. I worried ceaselessly about the uncertain future of this essay. So eventually I put my headphones away and did what many of us resort to when we’re stuck and need advice: I called my mom.
It turns out this was not the worst place to start; my mom is roughly the same age as Charlene and was alive to witness the rise of “I’ve Never Been to Me” on the charts from a paltry #97 in 1977 all the way to a respectable #3 in 1982. 1977 also happens to be the year my much-older sister was born. Mom was nineteen, living in the deep Georgia south with the disaffected high school boyfriend her parents had all but forced her to marry, shotgun style, after her pregnancy. Savannah was a long way from Charlene’s star-studded existence in Los Angeles, but according to the latter’s memoir (also called “I’ve Never Been to Me”), Charlene and Mom had a lot in common, both as “discontented mothers” and “regimented wives.” I don’t know about making love to preacher men or sipping champagne on a yacht, but Mom did lead quite the storied life throughout her twenties, first running away with my then two-year-old sister to Seattle, Washington where she made and sold dresses at the Pike Place Market, and, later, joining an Eastern European traveling circus with my dad where the two of them performed onstage with sea lions. My birth is not even the tenth most interesting item on her long list of adventurous experiences.
The first time I call her, Mom is in the middle of packing an order for her online paper crafting store, a business venture she’s taken on in her sixties. This enterprising is typical of her. While most of her friends are thinking about how they’d like to spend their retirement, Mom is out hustling for her future, one stamp set at a time. She seems distracted when I ask her whether she remembers Charlene and what she thought about “I’ve Never Been to Me” back when she was a young mother, herself. Just as Mom is about to answer, she’s overtaken by a dry coughing spell.
“People—people thought—it was stupid,” she gasps into the receiver.
“Like stupid how?” I ask. I wait while she takes a sip of water.
“The song was just so corny,” she says. “The music, the words, everything about it.”
I open my mouth to ask another question, but Mom says, “Can I call you back in thirty minutes?”
She does not call me back. 

As might be clear by now, I can’t stand “I’ve Never Been to Me,” and if you’re reading this, chances are good that you probably don’t like it either. The March Badness tourney is far from the first arena the song has been publicly called out in, nor is it the first “worst song” contest it’s unwittingly entered. Charlene’s “I’ve Never Been to Me” earned the #3 spot in a 2006 CNN “Worst Song of All Time” poll, and #4 in Jimmy Guterman’s The Worst Rock n’ Roll Records of All Time. Humor columnist Dave Barry gave the song an honorable mention in his own bad song survey (later chronicled in Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs) back in the 90s due to the sheer number of readers who took the time to write in and complain about it. Barry actually noted that while “I’ve Never Been to Me” might not have received the most votes, it was one of the few songs that inspired the most “intense hatred” among responders. Further evidencing this are the sheer number of personal blogs in which people have taken it upon themselves to convince the rest of the internet that Charlene’s song is one of the worst of all time.
But while many listeners can agree that “I’ve Never Been to Me” is, in fact, very bad, I was unable to find anyone who could articulate exactly how or why the song’s legacy has endured for so many decades. Why do we still remember—for better or for worse—what is, on its face, a crappy song by a woman with a short, arguably unremarkable musical career?
To answer this question, it might be important to consider the circumstances of what made Charlene famous in the first place. According to her memoir, Charlene grew up dreaming of becoming an actress or a singer. Her big chance came in 1976, when Motown signed Charlene as their first ever white artist. But the world wasn’t yet ready for “I’ve Never Been to Me.” The lyrics were too risqué, the idea of such a liberated woman (even one who ultimately learns her place) too counter to the more conservative “traditional” sensibilities of the time. Despite its great promise as a single, the song was an utter Billboard flop, barely scratching the top 100. Everyone seemed to agree Charlene had the voice, talent, and drive to sing, but it was apparent she lacked some ineffable quality one needs to successfully break away from the dreamers and become a star. Motown—and the American public—quickly lost interest in what Charlene had to offer.
Discouraged, she left Los Angeles in the early 1980s to follow her new husband, an ordinary man named Jeff, to his home country of England and found work in a local candy shop. Charlene’s dream of fame and stardom must have seemed then hopelessly beyond her reach. In another version of her life, the story might have ended here.

“I think it also helps to understand that everyone was trying to find themselves back then,” Mom says when I call her a second time. “There were all these movements, and the 70s were a time when women were becoming more independent and doing things our parents’ generation would find shocking. So women like Charlene were really bucking the system.”
I had asked Mom why she thought Charlene only became so popular five years after its initial failure. Though she admits to disliking the song and remembers laughing about it with her progressive Seattle friends when it was on the radio back in 1982, Mom is able to see “I’ve Never Been to Me” from a generous point of view I hadn’t considered, which frustrates me a little. I had wanted her perspective about what qualities she thought contributed to why the song was so bad, not its potential merits as a misguided baby step towards the third wave feminism we know today.
“But do you think Charlene was bucking the system, after all?” I ask. “Because even though she does go and lead this independent life, she ends up regretting it in the end, right? So it seems like the song is actually advocating for pretty traditional values.”
There is no question that the speaker of Charlene’s “I’ve Never Been to Me” has led a privileged and enviable life. She’s well-traveled, ostensibly wealthy, and has a lifetime of hedonistic experiences to fondly recall. But alas: she also has a problem. Between all that travel and lovemaking and champagne sipping she forgot to settle down and start a family. Now, at an advanced age (Charlene was 26 when the song was recorded), she has zero hope of finding a man who would be tolerant of her salacious past, leaving her unable to achieve something even adjacent to happiness. Like the ghosts of so many Christmas pasts, Charlene resigns herself to wandering uninvited into other women’s lives, warning them against pursuing the same freedoms, independence, and pleasures she once enjoyed. Instead, she implores women dreaming of a little excitement to appreciate the gift of their pedestrian, unfulfilling lives as housewives under the watchful eye of the patriarchy. You’ve got it made, honey, “I’ve Never Been To Me” seems to say, so plaster a smile on those cheeks! Your husband will be home soon and he’s expecting his dinner to be hot and on the table; kick off those shoes, sling that baby on your hip, and get cooking!
Mom pauses. “Yeah,” she says, “But I think the song might be more about living with regret. Like, she’s led this untraditional life and didn’t end up where she thought she would. It has that introspective quality to it. But I agree her perspective does feel dated, now.”
The song is dated, yes. But so is a lot of other music from the same era—plenty of stuff that doesn’t regularly crack the top five in “worst song” competitions, let alone merit consideration as a contender in these arenas. Why “I’ve Never Been to Me?” Why Charlene?
“Would it surprise you to hear that Charlene didn’t write the song?” I ask. “It was actually written by two men—Ron Miller and Kenny Hirsch.”
Mom laughs. “Well isn’t that typical,” she says.

To be clear, I don’t begrudge Charlene her successes, nor do I blame her for failing to recognize the more problematic aspects of “I’ve Never Been to Me.” I know she comes from a time (the 1970s) and a place (Hollywood) where a producer screaming at a woman if she doesn’t sing a better take is a motivational “kick up the butt” (Charlene’s actual words) rather than a terrifying, traumatic, or abusive experience. She may not have written the words, but Charlene does personally identify with the song’s message so strongly that she titled both her memoir and the domain for her official website after it. Though one can find many versions of the song by a variety of other singers, the legacy of “I’ve Never Been to Me” and Charlene are inextricably linked such that it is impossible to examine one without also interrogating the other.
By a divine (or perhaps cruel) stroke of luck, the push for feminism and gender equality had died down just enough in the early 80s for the public to give “I’ve Never Been to Me” another shot. A Florida radio DJ is credited with popularizing the song at the behest of his girlfriend, who was one of Charlene’s few fans the first time around. Almost overnight, Charlene had become famous. She took the first plane back to the states to promote the song and for several months her life resembled the stardom she had fantasized about as a child, replete with frenzied fans begging for autographs, fancy dinners paid for by the record label, and meet-and-greets with all the most idolized musicians of the day. But her fame was ultimately short lived; Motown had ensnared Charlene in an exploitative contract, and she would go on to take home less than $13,000 from the rerelease of her song. As that money began to run out, Charlene knew she would need another hit if she was going to establish herself in the industry as more than just a one-hit wonder.
Charlene hinged her second-chance career on a new song, also written by Ron Miller, entitled “Used to Be.” She was thrilled to have the opportunity to record the piece as a duet with none other than Stevie Wonder. True to his name, Wonder was a national sensation and every song he touched seemed to turn to gold. If anything could solidify her status as a serious musical artist, Charlene thought, it would be the success of this next song. But fate clearly had other plans. “Used to Be” peaked at a tepid #46 position on US charts and was banned outright on UK airwaves (yes, really) because of such unfortunate lyrics as:

Have another Chivas Regal
You’re twelve years old and sex is legal
Your parents don’t know where or who you are

This mistake would mark the beginning of the end for Charlene’s zombie-like career. In her memoir, she recounts this disappointment with particular bitterness. In the music business, you rarely get a second chance, and here she had squandered hers with a song that, on paper at least, should have been an easy hit. But even Stevie Wonder wasn’t enough to save “Used to Be” from itself. Charlene reports feeling shocked anyone would think the lyrics sexualized children, writing, “people misinterpreted it and thought we were condoning sex for 12-year-olds for God’s sake,” though, it should be noted, she does not offer a convincing alternate interpretation.
Charlene would never again record a song that broke the top 100. But despite the ever-mounting odds against her, Charlene has never once stopped chasing her next comeback. The final chapters of her memoir detail a series of increasingly desperate schemes to become relevant once again, including releasing a 2008 dance mix of “I’ve Never Been to Me” and touring the gay nightclub circuit for extra cash, at times sleeping in her car because she couldn’t afford the price of a hotel for the night. She admits this relentless pursuit of fame has caused strain on her relationship with her husband and daughters, but she still hasn’t given up on her dream of reclaiming her career with another hit. Her memoir concludes with this heartbreaking self-assessment:
“I look back on everything I’ve been through in my life with a sweet sadness…You sit there and childishly think that things are going to last and last, but they’re not. People are going to die, things are going to disappear, and songs will be forgotten. But there has to come a time when I will wake up, look at myself in the mirror and say, ‘Hey lady, you lady, I’ve been to paradise and now I’ve finally been to me.’ So I’d better start living my life before it’s too late.”
The irony in this, of course, is that it’s already too late. The book is over. Charlene, the heroine of this story, hasn’t found what she’s spent the better part of her life searching for. She’s lived the glamorous lifestyle of a star as well as the realities of a motherhood her song’s narrator so wishes could be hers, yet still, despite all of this, Charlene is left feeling unfulfilled. Who is to blame for this tragic outcome? Was it “I’ve Never Been to Me” that doomed Charlene to this Groundhog Day-esque cycle, forever trying and failing to find herself amid lofty goals of celebrity and fame? Or is it that Charlene’s short-lived fame could only ever have hinged on the improbable success of such an insufferable song? While we may never know the answer, one thing is clear. Though her 2017 memoir does not acknowledge this, Charlene’s song continues to thrive well beyond its expected lifespan in the spirit of competitions like this one. Unwittingly, Charlene has established a legacy for herself after all, but the cruel paradox of this recognition is a kind of attention she didn’t ask for and likely doesn’t appreciate.

“One more question, Mom,” I say.
“Uh-huh,” she says.
“Have you ever been to Me?”
“Oh god,” she laughs. “Who has time for that? I can find myself when I’m dead.”

The endurance of “I’ve Never Been to Me”—and, by extension, of Charlene—represents a kind of celebration of failure that should be familiar to all of us. In this way, Charlene’s “Me” becomes a metaphor for the impossible standard each of us privately holds for ourselves. A standard so high we have little chance of ever meeting, let alone exceeding, our own expectations—whether as writers, as parents, or as good people. As Confucius once said: no matter where you go, there you are. This is perhaps the most relatable thing about Charlene as an artist, and also what makes the song a cultural icon that habitually creeps into so many “worst song” tournaments. This is what makes “I’ve Never Been to Me” the bad song we love to hate. Because underlying its dated “feminist” sentiments, its not-so-subtle anti-abortion rhetoric, and more problematic stereotypes about motherhood than I can reasonably deconstruct in just one essay, is a song that doesn’t just look back and reflect on what it means to live with regrets. Rather, the song, much like Charlene herself, commands our attention with a sincerity so insistent, so grotesque, and so uncanny that we are all but forced to reckon with it. This is how “I’ve Never Been to Me” has stood the test of time. After more than forty years and against all odds it’s still here, damnit, and here it will stay, immortalized in our hearts and minds until each one of us—Charlene included—succumbs to the overwhelming relief of a death sweeter than any paradise.

Zoë Bossiere is a doctoral candidate at Ohio University, where she studies creative writing and rhetoric & composition. She is the managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction and the co-editor of its forthcoming anthology, entitled The Best of Brevity (Rose Metal Press, 2020). Find her online at zoebossiere.com or on Twitter @zoebossiere

ELENA PASSARELLO ON “MUSKRAT LOVE”

Muskrat mating season begins in March. I doubt Texas songwriter Willis Alan Ramsey knew this when he composed his now-infamous ballad of Susie and Sam—those two muskrats with bewilderingly WASP-y names. According to Ramsey’s misguided and possibly ‘lude-induced lyrics, the coital behaviors of muskrats include: eating bacon and cheese, the jitterbug, and a sort of ambiguous and whirling frottage, all of which takes place by candlelight. In fact, the song we all know as “Muskrat Love” was originally called “Muskrat Candlelight,”—a problematic detail, since muskrats do most of their mating in the water.
If it’s March when you’re reading this, you can bet your ass that right now, in some nearby wetland, a real-life muskrat Sam is hunting for his Susie. Finding her isn’t as mellow-gold as Ramsey imagines it, however, because there are often myriad Sams vying for the fittest Susie of any given pond, fighting viciously throughout the month for the right to mount her. Males choose their queen based on the pungent scent she squirts from the oily glands encircling her anus. Maybe this biological fact appeared in Ramsey’s earlier drafts of “Muskrat Candlelight,” but then had to be cut for time.
The final lyrics aren’t wrong about all the muzzle-nuzzling, though, as many zoological texts list “kissing” and grooming as part of muskrat courtship. But things go off-script with the line about Sam sidling up to Susie and “rubbin’ her toes.” In reality, muskrats possess neither fingers nor toes—they’re more like half-webbed murder-mitts covered in needle-sharp hairs and topped with claws. And since it’s not uncommon for aggressive muskrats to use those claws against rivals, when a real-life muskrat offers his paramour a foot rub, the claws he uses to massage her might still be sticky with the viscera of his enemies.
“How old are you?” skinny Sam might ask Susie while tickling her with his bloody digits.
“I just turned one, so I’m ready to breed!” she’d answer.
“You smell like a hot dumpster. Let’s get it on.”
The muskrat penis is wide and knob-tipped. It probably evolved these features to better maintain its purchase inside the slippery muskrat vaginal canal while the breeding pair “whirl and twirl and tangle” in the water. My favorite thing about muskrat sex (a phrase I never thought I’d type; thanks, Ander and Megan!) is the fact that two muskrats in flagrante delicto will occasionally take the humping to the next level by throwing their bodies onto a passing plank of driftwood, so they can float while they do it. I’m no biologist, but this is obviously some sort of twisted Titanic role-play, the finale of which involves Muskrat Susie pushing Muskrat Sam off the wooden plank, like Rose did to Jack in the movie. As she watches Sam sink to the muddy river bottom, Muskrat Susie climaxes.
Anyway. Sam and Susie’s floating kink—their musk-raft love, if you will—is a risky addition to their mating dance, since bonking on a log exposes the pair to predators. Raccoons pose the biggest threat to muskrats, though humans have also been known to hunt the rodents for their fur or, occasionally, their flesh. Eighteenth-century missionaries along the Detroit River were permitted muskrat during the Lenten meat fasts, and certain sects of the Michigan diocese still honor this with “Muskrat Friday” dinners from Mardi Gras to Easter (I’ve read that the meat tastes better if you drown it in sherry). Michigan’s raccoons are probably pissed that these Catholics keep poaching their food source every March. Unless, of course, said raccoons are Catholic, too.
The male half of the 1970’s duo Captain and Tennille, who isn’t a Captain and whose real name is Daryl, grew up Catholic but did so far away from any muskrat stew, in southern California. Both he and his wife/musical abettor Toni Tennille were vegetarians when they released their hit cover of “Muskrat Love” in 1976. And speaking of 1976—and of raccoons!—that same summer, Tennille went to a coke party at Gordon Lightfoot’s house where everyone was blasted out of their gourds and oblivious to the fact that a large family of raccoons had taken over Lightfoot’s kitchen.
I read this terrifying anecdote in Toni Tennille’s recent memoir, which is stuffed with alarming 70s details like Lightfoot’s trash panda kitchen crew, the risks of early hair transplant surgery, and the time Queen Elizabeth dozed off during a command performance of “Muskrat Love” at the White House (Henry Kissinger stayed awake, but was visibly disturbed). Tennille also devotes considerable page space to the merits of the sitcom Big Bang Theory, but only briefly mentions that she’s never seen an actual muskrat in her life—even though the animal screws its way through her third most popular song.
She says she first heard “Muskrat Love” in the car on the way to a nightclub gig, about a year before she and Captain Daryl got discovered. Given the timeline, they probably heard this 1973 version by the band America, which was both the first recording re-named “Muskrat Love” and the first to receive any real radio airplay. Weirdly enough, the year before, Lani Hall had recorded a soporific take on the song called “Sun Down” for the label that would eventually sign Captain and Tennille. “Sun Down” uses the exact same tune as “Muskrat Love,” but with new lyrics that omit the Susie and Sam storyline, and I fully reject this heinous act of muskrat erasure.
Unlike Lani Hall, the band America weren’t about to remove those titular muskrats; their version keeps all Ramsey’s rodent lyrics intact. This isn’t surprising, since America’s first two albums made notable contributions to the canon of animalian soft rock, what with that one song about the “alligator lizards in the air”—how did they get up there? Did somebody toss them?—and their other song about the horse with no name, which features crackerjack naturalist observations like “there were plants and birds and rocks and things.”
America’s take on “Muskrat Love” is peak Yacht Rock: so smoothed-out, it’s borderline menacing. Their rendition sports both an acoustic bass guitar and bongos, plus a double-tracked, whispery voice that sounds like a date offering you a post-coital doobie on his bearskin rug right after he gave you crabs. The band ignored their label’s pleas not to include the song on their third album and, perhaps as a middle finger, they made it the record’s opening track. They also cockily titled the album Hat Trick—an act of hubris made even funnier when it flopped. Guess they shoulda stuck with alligator lizards.
And hey! Since we’re on the subject of lizards, here’s something else I learned from Tennille’s book. Guess what Captain Daryl’s last name is? Dragon! As in somebody looked at a tiny little baby and decided to name it Daryl Dragon. Which leads me (and, I’m sure, all of us) to wonder why in the world these two didn’t call their act the freaking Dragon and Tennille? That’s infinitely cooler! And you know what would be even cooler than that? KOMODO DRAGON AND TENNILLE!!!!
Imagine an America (the country, not the shitty band) where the Billboard Hot 100 juggernaut of 1976 wasn’t “Muskrat Love,” but instead “Dragon Love,” about the erotic thrill-seekers Komodo Dragon Sam and Komodo Dragon Susie. They tie the knot in a badass desert ceremony with live snakes flying about and a basilisk egg dowry, and that night, Komodo Dragon Sam takes K.D. Susie to his lair so they can get busy atop a bunch of direwolf skins, and then she has to eat a raw horse heart in front of him while he makes hungry Aquaman eyes at her and pools of horseblood seep into her white-blond Khaleesi braids and yes, I did rip all those details from the Jason Momoa love scenes on Game of Thrones rather than look up the mating practices of real Komodo dragons because I’ve already Google-image-searched “muskrat penis” like fifteen times to write this essay, so I’m probably pushing it with the NSA as it is. OK fine, I just Googled “Komodo Dragons doing it” and to my surprise, their lovemaking actually seems quite gentle.
But my point here is why in the actual muskrat fuck would Daryl Dragon rebrand himself with some bogus naval rank when his given surname evokes the image of a storied, fire-breathing hell lizard…not to mention Jason Momoa? The answer to this question, my friends, is the 1970s.
I was born toward the end of the 70s, within months of Jason Momoa, which means we both could’ve been conceived while “Muskrat Love” played on the radio. Perhaps many of you reading this were born around then, too, and we The Lost Children of “Muskrat Love” should start a support group. While the particular tune to which our parents got busy is difficult (and awkward) to confirm, we do have plenty of documentation proving that the 70s—the petri dish that grew Momoa, myself and countless other late GenXers—were absolutely insane. All those thick chintzy fabrics and disco boots with goldfish in the heels and Queen Elizabeth falling asleep while a president nobody elected grooved in the chair next to her. People smoked about thirty cigarettes a day—forty if they were on an airplane—and brassieres were illegal. There was too much garbage and not enough gas and folks had basically stopped voting because it no longer seemed to work. Everyone was both alarmingly hairy and disturbingly horny and somebody gave a weekly TV show to a pair of mimes.
Captain and Tennille also had a TV program in the 70s, despite the fact that Captain Dragon often went days without speaking (maybe he was a mime, too?) and reportedly hated: jokes, the camera, dancing, people, and anything else that wasn’t a macrobiotic food product or a bulldog. Their show ran on ABC in the year of the Muskrat, aka 1976, and featured a skit about a bionic watermelon in which Toni portrayed her own arch nemesis, Queen Elizabeth II. They also staged a lip-synched performance of “Muskrat Love” for the show, and it serves as the closest thing to its music video (unless you count this alarming karaoke vid that I found, which looks like it inspired the movie Midsommar).
The TV show clip of “Muskrat Love” features two actors in full-body chipmunk suits who have been shrunk by some analog camera trick. They bounce on Tennille’s shoulders and on Cap’n Drag’n’s famous hat. At one point, they jump off the hat and look like they’re travelling downtown to fellate him, but it turns out they’re just headed to the edge of his keyboard, where they groove with the terpsichorean skills of that guy who spins the Qwik Payday Loans sign in front of my Walgreens.
This video is bad, y’all. It makes “The Bionic Watermelon” look like Citizen Kane. It’s cutesy and cheesy and miles away from the carnal habits of any rodent, reptile, or Momoa. But underneath the terrible visuals, you hear the special brand of Badness “Muskrat Love” offers. And I’ve been thinking about that Badness—delighting in it, honestly—all week. I needed something to distract me from, I dunno, every single piece of news I encountered. You don’t Google rodent wangs for a straight hour unless you’re seriously trying to forget the state of the world for a while.
The only indefensibly bad components of this “Muskrat Love”—what I would erase if I could teleport back 44 years—are the Captain’s post-prod electro-flourishes. With a few rare exceptions, any time a white dude discovers a cool new electronic musical toy, the results don’t age well. Remember when the Monkees learned about synthesizers? Or when John Tesh bought a keytar? Dare I even mention Peter Frampton here?
Most of the Captain’s sonic aggressions are MOOG-related: the rococo flips and gibbers and binary burps that, according to Tennille’s book, were meant to approximate both the dance of the randy muskrats and their eventual petites morts. While it’s true that courting muskrats do chirp and babble while they posture for one another, no muskrat ever sounded like a broken Nintendo farting along to the Deep Throat soundtrack. But to his credit, these noises do add the Captain to a long tradition of pop musicians misrepresenting sounds of the animal kingdom. A robin, be he rockin’ or not, won’t sing tweedlydeedlydeet; the flight of the bumblebee isn’t nearly as modulated as Rimsky-Korsakov imagines it; and even though Prince sounds amazing while screaming it, no dove has ever cried “Skype! Skype! Skype! Skype! Skyyyyyyyyyyyype!” on the A below High C.
But pop music has never really been about accuracy, of course. What’s more, I think pop forms are designed to harbor Badness, and often when a song does, it still has space to do some kind of work. Many of the entries in this tournament could support this. Sure, they’re awful songs, but rarely because they’re tedious (save maybe “Disco Duck” or “Toy Soldiers”). Our bracket is one of Badness that somehow manages to cultivate energy, and I hope we all celebrate the Energetically Bad in our voting this muskrat month. A few hundred listens in, I think “Muskrat Love” retains its energy via the very components that make it so pungently odious: Ramsey’s bestial lyrics, the Captain’s electric wanking, and all the tawdry 70s vibes Tennille’s vocals can muster.
Context plays a part here, too: this song represents an era of Badness we will never experience again: an age of only three channels and snail mail, when coke-addled cultural gatekeepers made unchecked decisions about what got injected into the living rooms and car speakers of almost everyone. “Muskrat Love” is a capsule from a colorful time that managed to be simultaneously puritanical and overheated, family-friendly and gross. The song epitomizes not simply what was wrong about the 70s, but what was spectacularly wrong about them, and thanks to thirty years of Boomer nostalgia, it’s this wrongness that I have been programmed to miss.
Such nostalgia is aided by the general production of this track, which is honestly pretty damn solid. Rather than the acoustic 60’s holdover approach that America took, this “Muskrat Love” sports the mellowest Hammond B3 you’ve ever heard. The lilting chords noodle Ramsey’s melody about in soft pastel drips. It’s a pleasing accompaniment to Tennille’s vocals, which are also on point. Lemme tell you, Toni Tennille isn’t much of a memoirist, but mama knows her way around a ballad. She’s got this wonderful, almost golden, mid-throat delivery that’s raspy and chewy and not only intoxicating; it sounds intoxicated.
Though she claims to have just said no throughout the decade, Tennille sings “Muskrat Love” like she’s orbiting the moons of Jupiter, as do most of my fave voices of the time. Take the river of barbiturates in Andrea True’s delivery of “More More More!” or Neil Young’s coke-boogered crooning of “Helpless” in The Last Waltz, or whatever the hell Minnie Riperton snorted to hit those top notes in “Loving You.” If you asked me to guess what drug yielded Tenille’s “Muskrat” tone, I’d probably guess an eight-ball of physical love. Toni sounds absolutely fucked in this song. You can almost hear the glow in her cheeks as she pulls a satin sheet around her, sits up, and lights a Newport menthol.
Tennille’s signature sound is also ironic, given the offstage coldness of her marriage to the Captain. She writes that though she tried to change him and despite how well they jibed professionally, he avoided showing her affection for over forty years. Can we just stop for a second and take that in? This song that we’ve loved to hate my entire life is the sound of a thirty-six-year-old woman with a Prince Valliant haircut singing like she’s been shagged within an inch of her sanity right next to her husband, who “couldn’t even give [her] a hug,” using whatever that does to a person’s psyche to croon about two horny muskrats. That, my friends, is an aesthetic Rubik’s cube I’ll never be able to click into place.
Tennille’s vocals are a teaser for what’s to come in “Do That To Me One More Time,” her 1979 hit that is so stanky with white-lady coital fervor, it makes “Muskrat Love” sound like “Old Shep.” But here’s the thing: I never want to hear “Do That To Me One More Time” again. I think that song is a different brand of bad—the kind that rarely interests me because its bad aspects are enough to flatten it: the self-indulgent tempo; the monosyllabic, single-entendre verses; and the Lyricon solo that’s nothing short of a federal crime.
For another example of the irredeemably bad, we need look no further than America’s flop album Hat Trick. A few tracks down from their lesser “Muskrat Love” is a song written by the band with a suspiciously similar title: “Molten Love” (not to be confused with “Molting Love,” which I wrote yesterday about Muskrat Suzie getting aroused whenever Sam sheds his winter fur). I just listened to “Molten Love” six times and I’ve already forgotten everything about the experience other than 1) I hated it and 2) someone blows bong bubbles in the fadeout. Also 3) this chestnut lyric from the chorus: “I want to carry you across a threshold of fireflies and violet smoke all alone.” Da fuck?
All this is to say that yes, “Muskrat Love” is rotten, and I hope you’ve all got it topping your brackets, but even if it wins this pantheon of Badness, I’d still take spectacularly bad—loaded vocal delivery bad, 70s doomsday bad—over forgettably bad any day. “Muskrat Love” beats “Molten Love” in my heart forever. Note, too, that I would specifically take Captain and Tennille’s version over the renditions by the actual author, or that lady who omitted the original song’s oddest lyrics, or those hit-maker dummies with their bongs and bongos. Sure, this version has topped Worst Song Ever listicles my entire life, but it’s managed to stay alive. It has rented space in the consciousness of three generations, like the family of raccoons overtaking Gordon Lightfoot’s kitchen.
And lord knows being a modern human can make you crave a ludicrous outlet—like, say, an ode to a pair of insatiable semi-aquatic mammals, or a memoir about the troubled mammalian lounge act who sang said ode. Maybe “Muskrat Love” also sticks because it proves to us how truly bad life in America (the country, not the shitty band) can get. It reminds us that, at certain points, the citizenry has craved the vibrantly ridiculous as some sort of national coping strategy. On both personal and public levels, we occasionally ache to stop and smell the muskrats, which makes this song a Badness life raft. Nimble, loaded, catchy, and gross, it’s a last-ditch transportation device for when we need something stupid to hold close—stink and all—as we float away from the larger things in our lives that make even less sense.

Elena Passarello is the author of Animals Strike Curious Poses and Let Me Clear My Throat.