(12) CHARLENE, “I’VE NEVER BEEN TO ME”
finally stopped
(3) starship, “nothing’s gonna stop us now”
488-458
and will play in the final four

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 March 24.

This Dream, Together: melissa faliveno On Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now”

Heart to Heart

The lights of the RCA Dome in Indianapolis are low, bodies packed in tight and pressed together in the dark. There’s an energy in the air: thick and giddy and humming. It’s a day that’s been circled on calendars in Midwestern kitchens for months, days leading up to it crossed out in black Xs. Like a holiday or vacation, but more: a destination, maybe a destiny, this thing we’ve driven hundreds of miles to see. We the weekend warriors, we of the wanting, we of the dreams.
And then: the first five beats of a snare drum, a rapid-fire explosion of sound. It’s a LinnDrum, actually, a drum machine that’s not a drum at all, but I don’t know this yet. Today I believe everything I hear.
And then come the synths: cool and dreamlike and compulsive, twinkling like stars and soaring above the four-four bass (not a real bass) and kick (also not a real drum).
     The lights go up, and the stage is alive, and we are too. And the male vocals sing:

Lookin’ in your eyes I see a paradise / This world that I’ve found is too good to be true.

But it is true: This is paradise. We’ve found it.
A lone man paces the stage. He holds a wireless mic, or maybe he wears a headset. Either way he’s got his arms raised high and he’s clapping. And we follow his lead, because he is our leader. We do whatever he tells us to do. Because this man has promised us something, and we believe he will give it to us. We believe that he can. We believe in him, and yes, we even believe in ourselves.
We clap in bad time, thousands of doughy Midwesterners with no discernible rhythm. We are compelled, as if by some intangible force, to pump our fists in the air. And when the female vocals come—and they come high and loud—we screech them together:

Let ‘em say we’re crazy / I don’t care about that / Put your hand in my hand, baby, don’t ever look back.

We are ecstatic. We are fired up: with anticipation, with love, most of all with hope.

Let the world around us / Just fall apart / Baby we can make it if we’re heart to heart.

What does it even mean? We have no idea. But we feel it anyway. We are heart to heart. And in one massive, stadium-sized chorus we sing it, we scream it, we are filled up with the universe-sized joy of it:

And we can build this dream together / Standing strong forever / Nothing’s gonna stop us now.

I am singing at the top of my lungs. I might be crying. I am pumping my small fist in the air. It is 1993, or 1994. I am ten or eleven years old. And I am not here in the RCA Dome to see Starship, no: I am here for an Amway convention.

The Dream

Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” is a bad song. It is objectively bad. But oh, how I loved it. And oh, how I can’t help but love it still. Maybe it’s so bad it’s good. Maybe, more likely, I love it for its unabashed badness, like I’ve loved so many bad songs before (not least Starship’s other badsterpiece, “We Built This City,” to which I choreographed several interpretive dances as a child). But when I play “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” at home on my guitar, which I’ve been doing with embarrassing frequency these days, I play quietly. I certainly never plug in. I don’t belt the lyrics; I whisper them low. I don’t want my neighbors to hear.
It’s not the music that makes this song so bad. It’s actually a solid chord progression (though a repetitive one—verse, chorus, and bridge), and Grace Slick and Mickey Thomas can sing. It’s a song built entirely of hooks, so catchy one can’t help but sing along. (In the 2014 movie The Skeleton Twins, a lip-syncing duet by Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader is predicated on the song’s irresistibility). We might even forgive the LinnDrum, the Charvel MIDI guitar, and all those synths—the purely synthetic pop products of the eighties.

It’s the lyrics that make this song so bad. To wit: “Standing here beside you / want so much to give you / this love in my heart that I’m feeling for you.” And: “Take it to the good times / see it through the bad times / whatever it takes is what I’m gonna do.” Such lyrics aren’t just embarrassing; they also possess that most insidious kind of badness: the bogus message they’re trying to sell. Those syrupy-sweet clichés about love as battle, love as a dream for which two people against all odds will fight, and win. That they are invincible. It’s saccharine, insipid, and stupid, an eyeroll in F#. From instrumentation to implication, the song a sham. It’s bunk, baloney, codswallop, claptrap—so completely built of crap that Grace Slick herself has suggested the song, and the whole Starship enterprise (see what I did there?) was bullshit.
What better song, then, to serve as an anthem for Amway, that titan of American fraud, purveyor of impossible dreams? At conventions, on motivational tapes, its lyrics repeated by wealthy white men who paced stages across America: “We can build this dream together,” they said. “Nothing’s gonna stop us now.” We listened, and we believed it. We sang our anthem and we turned it up loud.

From Badass-ness to Badness (Or, From Airplane to Starship) 

When the realization came, it hit like a rocket crashing to earth. That the woman who sang such psychedelic rock anthems as “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love” could possibly be the same woman who sang “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” seemed at best a bad dream, at worst some kind of nightmare trip. But it’s true: Grace Slick was both Acid Queen of the sixties and shoulder-padded, hair-sprayed synth-pop-star of the eighties.
How does a musician of such talent and imagination, whose low commanding vibrato gave us the words “Feed your head,” find herself singing “If this world runs out of lovers, we’ll still have each other”? To understand the fall, we must start with the ascension.
     In the ill-fated voyage from Airplane to Starship, there’s a lot of convoluted history: firings and departures and lawsuits, side gigs that became bands like Hot Tuna, the shedding and reclaiming of names, various aircrafts relaunched long after they should have been grounded. But where the story begins for Grace Slick is in 1965, at a San Francisco club called the Matrix. She found herself in the crowd, watching the first show of Paul Kantner and Marty Balin’s new band, the Jefferson Airplane. The experience inspired Slick’s own first band, the Great Society, for which she wrote “White Rabbit”—the product, she says, of twenty-four hours of Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain and a lot of LSD. They eventually opened for Airplane at the Fillmore, the famous haven for tripping flower children, and a year later Slick was recruited as Airplane’s new frontwoman. “White Rabbit” and another Great Society song, “Somebody to Love,” made it onto their 1967 record Surrealistic Pillow; the Airplane took off, and Slick was crowned a Queen of Rock.
“The first time I saw Grace play I was entranced by the strength of her delivery,” Kantner says in the 2004 documentary Fly Jefferson Airplane. “The power and the strength of her onstage was amazing.”
On “American Bandstand,” in 1967, Slick—who David Crosby called “the Chrome Nun”—wears something between a habit and a druid’s cape and stares directly into the camera as she lip-syncs. In one performance of “White Rabbit,” she floats atop Marty Balin’s organ; it’s an acid-drenched video, and we trip along with her. Playing Woodstock at sunrise, a dreamy-eyed, slow-voiced Slick, hair wild and dressed in white, promises the crowd “a new dawn.” And in 1968, a year before the Beatles did it, Airplane plays a rooftop in New York City, yelling “Wake up, you fuckers!” as crowds of dark-suited businessmen gather below. In the footage, Slick wails into the sky, her voice carrying up above the high-rises.

The word “badass” gets tossed around a lot, but if ever there was a badass Grace Slick was it. She recorded a solo album called Manhole, and once hatched plans to spike Richard Nixon’s tea with LSD (she and her conspirator, the anarchist Abbie Hoffman, were thwarted by White House security). In her book, Somebody to Love? A Rock and Roll Memoir, Slick writes of a show in Chicago, when a man in the audience yelled at her to take off her chastity belt.
“I look directly at him and say, ‘Hey, I don’t even wear underpants,’” she writes. “I pull my skirt up over my head for a beaver shot, and the audience explodes with laughter. I can hear the guys in the band behind me muttering, ‘Oh, Jesus.’”  
Slick was a drinker. She was arrested several times, once for waving a gun at a cop, once for drinking wine and reading poetry in public, and usually for talking shit. In 1978, four years after Jefferson Airplane became Jefferson Starship, she donned a Heidi outfit and goose-stepped across a stage in Hamburg, drunkenly berating the audience.
     “Who won the fucking war?” she yelled. Kantner, who was by then the father of Slick’s daughter, asked her to leave the band; she did, and went to AA.
In interviews, Slick is smart, funny, and self-deprecating, and talks openly about her problem with “drunk mouth” and “talking under the influence.” In 1981, she climbed back aboard Jefferson Starship, sober and ready to play it straight. But Kantner left in 1984, later explaining: “The band became more mundane and not quite as challenging and not quite as much of a thing to be proud of.” Slick stayed and kept the rights to the songs, Kantner sued for the name “Jefferson,” and the band became Starship. Mickey Thomas, recruited after Balin’s departure in 1978, took the reins and sang sweet-voiced duets with Slick.
“Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now,” written by hitmaking duo Albert Hammond (father of Strokes guitarist Albert Hammond, Jr.) and Diane Warren, was commissioned by director Michael Gottlieb for his exquisitely bad 1987 movie, Mannequin. Hammond credits a drawn-out divorce, and finally getting to marry his long-term girlfriend, as the inspiration for the song. “It’s almost like they’ve stopped me from marrying this woman for seven years,” he said to Warren. “They’re not gonna stop me doing it.”
Included on both the Mannequin soundtrack and Starship’s album No Protection, the adult-contemporary power ballad hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on April 4, 1987, and stayed there for two weeks; it was No. 1 on the UK Singles Chart for four weeks, and hit the top-ten in six European countries.
Slick hated it.
“In the 80s we weren’t writing our own songs,” she told Vanity Fair in 2012. “It was like being in L.A. rather than San Francisco. I was in my 40s and I remember thinking, ‘God, this is just awful.’ But I was such an asshole for a while, I was trying to make up for it by being sober…by being a good girl.”
She left Starship in 1988, and with the exception of a rare reunion show retired from music. I’m not saying “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” made her do it, but maybe I am.

Going Diamond

My father always wanted to be his own boss. The son of a barber from Orange, New Jersey, he started a small business of his own, counting the inventory of convenience stores, bodegas, and gas stations in Florida, and then Wisconsin. It was work my mother and I did with him, on our hands and knees in dusty stores across the state on weekends, large manual calculators in hand. The business was a side gig, part of a larger dream: that my father would one day work only for himself—never again to walk a department-store floor, spend days on the road selling forms, heft boxes or sort mail in a hospital basement. But it never worked out that way.
Imagine, then, what the promise of Amway must have sounded like. The promise of financial independence, of providing, of freedom. This was the dream Amway peddled. It promised that if you worked hard enough, you too would be wealthy—like billionaire cofounder Rich DeVos, father-in-law of Betsy—that you would go Diamond (the Amway ladder is made of jewels, with Diamond at the top). This was the message we were given, and it’s the message we bought.
We also bought products. Amway-branded everything filled up our cupboards and closets: SA8 detergent, LOC floor cleaner, Artistry makeup and Satinique shampoo, Glister toothpaste, Nutrilite vitamins, the Big Cookie—a giant oatmeal-raisin rock that could have been branded Colon Blow. We were no longer allowed to shop at the grocery store. The Amway catalogue, we were told, had everything we’d ever need.
     It was my job to fill out the order forms.
“Soon you’ll get a starter kit of your own,” my father told me as I hunched over the kitchen table, scribbling product numbers. The Amway equivalent to a confirmation or bat mitzvah, when I would become not a woman but a tiny entrepreneur. In the background, a tape played on the stereo, the promise of riches proselytized by a conservative Christian man who was indeed extraordinarily wealthy, but not from selling soap. Between his words were the ones I loved: We can build this dream together.

Fake Plastic Girl

It’s time to talk about Mannequin. The whole reason “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” exists, it is a movie so bad it’s a wonder. So miserable it might be a miracle. Mannequin is not just a bad movie; it’s quite possibly the worst movie I have ever seen.
I watched it for the first time only recently, having somehow escaped its clutches all these years. And not only will I never get that $3.99 Fandango rental or those ninety precious minutes back, I will never be able to unsee it. It’s etched indelibly into my brain, a plague upon my consciousness that will no doubt send me to an early grave.
For those lucky enough to have missed Mannequin, a quick plot summary: In ancient Egypt, a young (white) woman is doomed to marry a man she doesn’t love. The gods spare her, naturally, by transforming her into a mannequin in 1980s Philadelphia. Jonathan, a young failure of an artist played by a motorcycle-driving, pervy Andrew McCarthy, assembles her in a mannequin factory. She is beautiful. She is perfect. She is his. Then she comes alive—but only in front of him. He falls in love with her, of course, because he made her; because she helps him become a hugely successful window-display artist but takes none of the credit; because she lives only for him. A fake plastic female, the movie declares, is the perfect woman.

Atrociously unfunny slapstick and witless hijinks abound, and McCarthy’s Jonathan is so much of what’s wrong with America: a mediocre white dude failing fantastically upward. Kim Cattrall as plastic muse manages to be somewhat charming, as does Meshach Taylor, the actually-talented window-display artist and flamboyantly gay caricature named Hollywood (the movie deals in casual homophobia and racism almost as effortlessly as it does misogyny, but not quite). Rotten Tomatoes gives it an aggregate 22 percent, which is stunningly high; The Washington Post called it “made by, for, and about dummies;” and Roger Ebert gave it a generous half-star, deeming it not only “full of clichés” but, simply, “dead.”
The song doesn’t come in until the last scene. (A reminder that the whole reason I sat through this shitheap was the song. I almost watched Mannequin 2: On the Move, because the song also appears in the sequel, but I actually feared death.) Once it did, what struck me was this: The movie is so bad it makes the song seem good. In the universe of badness, if Mannequin is the ninth circle of hell, “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” is a polystyrene paradise.
In the music video, Grace Slick plays the role of mischievous mannequin come to life, and Mickey Thomas is a convincing McCarthy—he mostly just looks around dumbly and dances with his hands. Slick, like Cattrall, is pretty delightful, despite the overwhelming emptiness one feels while watching; she rocks those eighties shoulder pads, that eyeliner and huge-sprayed hair, with her signature spooky grin. At the end of Mannequin, the plastic girl becomes a real live lady and—let ‘em say we’re crazy!—the lovers get married. In the music video, Slick and Thomas both end up as mannequins, which seems a much more fitting end.

The Tapes

Each month, we got a new tape in the mail. They were audio cassettes, ninety minutes of motivation by way of yee-hawing about dreams and boot-straps cut with songs. Bad songs. The kind of songs meant to get one “fired up.” “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” was on several tapes from the 80s and early 90s, along with another terrible Starship song, “It’s Not Over (‘Til It’s Over),” Kenny Loggins’s “Danger Zone,” and Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger.” We listened to the tapes whenever we got in the car; they blared from the living-room stereo. Gone was the classic rock, here were men like Rich DeVos and their promises of pools and Cadillacs and kitchens, wives who spoke of serving Husband and God. We listened on repeat, memorizing the words.
The Amway mantra was “Show the Plan (STP).” They chanted this on the tapes, too. To Show the Plan meant inviting friends, coworkers, and neighbors to your home—or inviting yourself to theirs—to try to get them to buy, and then sell, the products. While the Wife served coffee and cocktail wieners, the Husband drew on an easel the basic model of any multilevel-marketing scheme, which of course took the shape of a pyramid.
     In “It’s Not Over (‘Til It’s Over),” Mickey Thomas sings: “You can’t build a dream without a plan.” On the drive home from Indianapolis, I scrawled STP in the fogged-up windows of our Chevy. In freshman-year math class, I spotted a sticker with the same three letters plastered to the binder of the coolest girl in my grade.
I tapped her on the shoulder.
“Do you Show the Plan too?” I whispered, frizzy-haired and giddy.
     “What are you talking about?” She said with a scowl, then turned her back.
I had no idea who the Stone Temple Pilots were.

The Gear Shift

A note about the key change. It comes at the end of the song, like any respectable key change. It’s the classic truck driver’s gear shift, the proverbial long-hauler saying, We’re on the open highway now, baby; let’s kick this big rig into fifth. We jump from F# to G, just a half-step up but it might as well be another universe, higher than most contraltos can sing. But Grace Slick nails it, and Mickey Thomas does too.
The gear shift doesn’t come with any new lyrics; you just hear the same words you’ve been hearing in a shiny new key—in this case with some added Hey Babys and Woos and impressively high wails. The gear shift is great. It incites—maybe requires—a fist pumped high in the air, which Mickey Thomas delivers in the video along with a perfectly-timed HEY! With those two triplets—one fast, one slow—we know what’s coming; in six synthetic snare hits we transcend the stratosphere. And as that guitar solo carries us to the stars, we can’t help ourselves; we pump our fists in the air too.
But the gear shift is also a gimmick, a superfluous trick of shlock-pop producers who say, “Let’s just go ahead and get these suckers to pump those fists for no reason.” It’s a lie, promising us something with no substance. It’s a manipulation, and it works.

The Dream, Deferred

In December 2008, Indianapolis’s RCA Dome imploded. In video footage, after a series of small controlled explosions at its foundation, the stadium collapses in on itself in slow-motion—a fitting end to the site of an Amway convention, just as the economy was doing the same. But as it falls, the dome’s replacement, the Lucas Oil Stadium, stands behind it—a reminder of the tenets upon which cities, and this country, are built.
I’m not sure when or how my family got out of Amway. Like so many things, we don’t really talk about it. What I know is that my mother—once a bra-burning hippie, who had loved Grace Slick but hated Starship—hated the conservative messages Amway sold, and the good ol’ boys who told her that her real job was not to manage a Marshall’s but to serve her husband.
     I also know that we never got rich. And one day the SA8 and Satinique and Artistry and Big Cookie were gone, and we were allowed to shop at the grocery store again.  
For a time, maybe Grace Slick imploded too. But she rose from the wreckage—and by that I mean not addiction but Starship—and built a different kind of dream. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996 as a member of Jefferson Airplane, which received a lifetime achievement award in 2016. At age eighty, Slick now spends most of her time painting: portraits of musicians, mostly, her dead friends from the sixties—Jerry Garcia, Janice Joplin, Jim Morrison—along with some trippy white bunnies wearing marijuana-leaf capes. In 2017, she licensed “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” to Chick-fil-A for a TV commercial, then gave all the proceeds to the LGBTQ civil rights organization Lambda Legal.
“We can use our gifts to help stop the forces of bigotry,” she wrote in a Forbes op-ed. “Nothing’s gonna stop us now.”
Paul Kantner died in 2016, and Marty Balin followed in 2018. Jefferson Starship continues to tour, with original member David Freiberg and frontwoman Cathy Richardson—who’s been singing “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit” and “Find Your Way Back” and “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” pretty well for decades—at the helm; while a separate offshoot, Starship Featuring Mickey Thomas, is still touring too, ostensibly playing the same songs. It’s confusing, and none of it is very good.
Today, when Grace Slick talks about Starship, she’s the first to call it what it was.
     “That was a sell-out band,” she says in an interview. “The Airplane was a smorgasbord, but the Starship I hated.” She sang the songs, she says, but it took some big-time faking. 
“I felt like I’d throw up on the front row but I smiled and did it anyway.”
     In one video interview, she is asked about “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.” She laughs, and it’s a big, contagious cackle. She falls backward comedically, as if in pain, and moans.
“A dumptruck will stop you right in your tracks if you don’t look,” she says. “Oh, man…it’s such horseshit.”

Melissa Faliveno (pictured above, early nineties, around the time of the Amway convention) has never had her ears pierced. Hair by Satinique™. Rather than an entrepreneur she became essayist, and her first collection, Tomboyland, is forthcoming in August 2020. 

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