the first round
(5) michael damian, “rock on”
rocked
(12) chris de burgh, “lady in red”
125-120
and will play on in the second round

Read the essays, watch the videos (if available), listen to the songs, feel free to argue, tweet at us, and consider. Then vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 3.

lee anne gallaway-mitchell on “rock on”

1989: Where do we go from here?

In 1989, I graduated from elementary school, and to celebrate a group of moms organized a party with a 1950’s theme.
In one picture from the party, I stand next to a friend who wears a pink poodle skirt and white t-shirt, bobby socks and saddle shoes, all specially made or purchased for the occasion. All the girls whose families had money managed this head-to-toe look. I am wearing an ensemble of keds, rolled-up jeans, and an oversized white button-down shirt that my dad, a farmer, never wore. My dad’s letterman jacket from high school is slung over my shoulder. Lockney High School. Quarterback. #12. Class of 1966. My grandmother, former Miss Memphis 1952 (Texas, not Tennessee), gave me a scarf to tie around my ponytail. My ponytail hides the fact of my frizzy mullet perm. In the picture, I look appropriately 1950s, just a teenage girl on a Saturday afternoon hanging out at home, listening to records, writing in my diary. I was not dressed for a sockhop.
While the other girls looked like girls dressed up as teenagers from the 1950s, I looked like a teenager. I stood a head taller than everyone in my class, and I had breasts past the training bra stage. My period was no longer a surprise. I was eleven years old.
The other girl in the picture had both cassette box sets of all of the relevant 1950’s music. Both sets came in a plastic jukebox, one pink and one blue, with a stack of about ten cassettes each, a cassette for every year, I think. My friend listened to them constantly. Going 50s was probably her mom’s idea for the party in the first place.
My family could afford the Stand By Me soundtrack (1986), which we had to buy twice, because we wore it out. We learned to make copies. The action of the movie takes place in 1959. The boys are 12, about the age my dad would have been. These boys would most likely go to war.
Three years later, in 1989, Corey Feldman who played Teddy in Stand By Me, starred opposite the other Corey (Haim) in Dream a Little Dream, a film that featured Michael Damian’s hit song “Rock On.” In the song, Damian asks “Where do we go from here?” and honestly, when talking about “Rock On,” I don’t know where to start. Even at age eleven, I didn’t like this song. I was too busy listening to Bon Jovi’s New Jersey.

Now: Hey, kids, you boogey, too, did ya?

If it’s your first time hearing this song, do not watch the video. Go do something else, but listen. Maybe go for a drive. Why?  I cannot hear the song without seeing the video—one played repeatedly on MTV and on “Night Tracks” (the weekend music video show on TBS for those of us in rural areas and with limited cable). However and whenever I heard the song in the past, I had to leave the room. It’s like when I have to cover my eyes when someone on television is about to get humiliated. I just can’t endure it.
So, imagine my discomfort when I began listening to it repeatedly these last couple of months. It helped to have other people hear it with me. My children, ages 10 and 8, found it “confusing.” My students in my intro level creative writing class at the university also used the word “confusing.” One student declared, “It’s just so awkward.” And a few students agreed with what I had known all along: The song is forever frozen in time, stuck in its own identity crisis.
If I find the song awkward, the movie is hopelessly so.
My husband and I watched Dream a Little Dream, and neither one of us could figure out this self proclaimed teen “metaphysical drama” of body swapping (another 80s trope). I’ll try to explain, and to keep things simple I’m just going to use the actors’ names instead of the characters. Jason Robards, wishing he could be young again, somehow implants his soul in Coery Feldman’s body. Robards through Feldman convinces the pretty dance team member played by Meredith Salenger to help him get back to his old body so he can be with his wife again and they can continue to grow old together because being young can sometimes suck, too, and in ways that are suckier than being old. 
There’s a disturbing side story involving Salenger’s character, Lainie. She dates the rich, abusive asshole, and her mother roofies her (her own damn daughter!) in order to keep Lainie from hooking up with the Feldman/Robards hybrid. Rich asshole kid and Feldman have a confrontation in the alley, the very same smoky alley in the Damian video. And, it is this scene in which “Rock On” plays its part. However, the song shows up in snippets throughout the movie whenever there’s an increase in tension between characters or when time is starting to run out. It’s only the opening measures of the song, the pulsing baseline, a kind of heartbeat of the movie, I guess, and then nothing. Next scene. Somehow all the souls end up back in their proper bodies, and Salenger and Feldman end up together with Feldman’s misfit character more confident and wise but still true to his own way.
At the end of the movie, my husband looked at me strangely and was all, “Uh, thanks for the movie night, I guess?” And, “That movie required way more alcohol than we had on hand” because what in the hell did we just watch?
A side note on Dream a Little Dream: I needed help at our local video store, Casa Video, here in Tucson to find this movie on the shelves a few months ago (a thriving video store, y’all!). I told the clerk that I first watched the movie a week before its VHS release because my uncle ran the video store in our very small town and I was able to “preview” movies. I didn’t like it at age eleven, and I doubted I would like it again at forty-one. We had a fun conversation about the Coreys, about the great talent of Jason Robards, about our surprise that Harry Dean Stanton had a starring role. And, then, hey “That’s Natty Gann who’s now married to Patton Oswalt!”
While it’s a side note, it does return us to the fatal flaw of the song and the movie: the crisis between all the things it aspires to be and what it becomes. What if we went back to the beginning, to how “Rock On” became a song?

The Lyrics: Jimmy Dean vs. James Dean and Other Confusions

David Essex wrote “Rock On” for the 1973 film That’ll Be the Day, but the song was considered too weird to be included. It did, however, manage to make the closing credits of the American release of the movie. “Rock On” (1973)  had a respectable run on international music charts.
That’ll Be the Day was a kind of retrospective of early British rock in the 1950s and a documentary-style exploration of wandering youths working carnivals in post World War II England. Ringo Starr plays Essex’s friend. And, frankly, both musicians portray terrible characters. Starr talks about “bagging birds” (and he ain’t talking pheasants though the hunter metaphor is apt), and the main character played by Essex actually rapes a young woman outside the fun fair where they work the Tilt-a-Whirl. Even so, That’ll Be the Day was successful enough to spawn the sequel Stardust. It’s tagline is: "Show me a boy who never wanted to be a rock star and I'll show you a liar." It was another movie featuring a cast of musicians playing young and hungry musicians trying to make it big. The actors (all male) had perhaps aged out of their roles by ten years or more.
In an interview, Essex says that “Rock On” is about “Americana” and how American culture shaped the early sounds of rock music in England where dance halls featured local bands trying to capture that sound. And the song does transmit a kind of telegraphed nostalgia for the 1950s and its music.
In very sparse lyrics, Essex references three songs: “Shout” (1959) by the Isley Brothers, “Summertime Blues” (1958) by Eddie Cochran , and “Blue Suede Shoes” (1956) by Carl Perkins. All of these songs, while standing on their own merits by the original songwriters, were covered by other artists to oftentimes greater success as far as sales and airplay. The Beatles had a hit with “Shout.” Elvis hit it hard with “Blue Suede Shoes.” Even “Summertime Blues,” a posthumous release for Cochran after his death in a car accident, became a country hit for Alan Jackson in the 1990s. All of these songs kept “rocking on.”

Essex calls on one cultural icon by name as if to conjure him from the grave. In fact, he uses two names: James Dean and, more informally, Jimmy Dean. At the time I must have wondered why he was singing about the sausage guy who grew up down the road from where I did. My grandmother’s second husband had his hair cut during the depression by Jimmy Dean’s mother down in Plainview, Texas. I mean, he sang “Big Bad John” and created a sausage empire and all, but he’s no James Dean.
Perhaps this 1950’s nostalgia can be broken up into two camps: (1) When James Dean was alive, and (2) After James Dean died. Paula Abdul’s “Rush, Rush” and its video homage to 1955’s Rebel Without a Cause, would come later in 1991, but it was still riding that wave of James Dean nostalgia. 1991 was also the year that REM released “Drive” which ponders David Essex’s “Where do we go from here?” However, Stipe and REM, with an admitted nod to Essex, adapt the nostalgia to fit the despair of the speaker and listeners and their moment.

“Rock On” Streetfight: 1973 vs. 1989

David Essex’s original works, in a way, because Essex can sing like he really doesn’t give a shit. On the same album as “Rock On,” Essex gives us “Streetfight,” which is grittier and tougher than “Rock On” but with a similar bassline beat and some horns breaking it all down in the middle. And when those horns come in on “Streetfight,” the shit gets real. The two songs pair together nicely. “Rock On” might be the song Essex’s streetfighter uses to wind with a couple of beers after a hard night kicking ass. (It’s worth watching this video of highlights from the 1979 film Warriors set to “Streetfight,” especially if you need to get in an ass-kicking mood.)
Years later, when Essex folds “Rock On” into his “jukebox musical” All the Fun of the Fair, we see the aging rocker in the role of a carnival barker, poking fun at himself, admitting that though he’s older he once “rock and rolled” with the best of them. The song grows with Essex into a humorous look at aging and youth.
But, I must say: I’m not too wild about the Essex version of the song either. It’s okay. Musically, it’s interesting. No chords. All bass, brass, and beats. It’s funky, that’s for sure. 1989’s ‘Rock On” lacks the funkiness of the original, a funkiness that original producer Jeff Wayne and bassist Herbie Flowers honored in the arrangement because, as Wayne noted, the strength of the song was in “the hollows, the absences and the mood in the lyrics.” Damian’s cover adds so much by way of instrumentation, the spare lyrics can’t breathe. The hollows disappear.

See Her Shake on the Silver Screen

If anything, the greatest offense of “Rock On” (1989) is its awkwardness, in how confusing both song and video are, and in 1989 people were still watching music videos. At least I was. I kept a VHS in the machine at the ready so I could record my favorite ones.
Damian’s cover aims for a hard edge and then undercuts it in the video. He even hams it up at the end when it becomes a sing-along with the stars of the movie, as if to say, “Look, I’m just kidding. I’m still me. This is fun. I’ll dance on stage with the Coreys.”
And, maybe he has a point: Isn’t rock and roll supposed to be fun?
The video wears the song’s confusion perhaps best of all. Damian is on stage. He is in an alley. He is in a room of black and white tiles. (What is it with these checkerboard rooms and why are there houseplants in this one?) He stands perhaps in a warehouse of some sort, a big box fan rotating ominously behind him. He wears black leather then kicks back all cozy in a turtleneck. He gets down to business in a suit then slips back into casual with a white shirt and wool vest. And, still, the video manages to capture scenes from the movie. All in three minutes and seventeen seconds. It’s a lot.
The video is bad because it’s awkward (again, that word), because it tries to go too many places all at once. It attempts and fails to dress itself up in toughness. It has a hell of a time picking out an outfit and sticking with it. The video itself is a costume. Like the song, it’s over-accessorized.
One has to wonder if “Rock On” was Damian’s attempt at a tougher image. Damian had spent the previous decade playing the rockstar Danny Romalotti on The Young and the Restless, a soap opera everyone in my family watched obsessively, even more obsessively than Dallas. And while Danny was a total rockstar who went on tour and everything and all the girls loved him, he played against rock-n-roll bad boy type by being the really good guy. Danny’s storyline would take him out of Genoa City on tour any time Michael Damian went on tour.
In an interview in People Magazine (July 10, 1989), Damian talks about the role of Danny Romalotti at the height of the song’s success on the charts, and it’s clear that the two often blur and understandably so:
For the most part, Damian says, it’s a kick “to be able to do the same things in real life that you’re doing in a character.” He strongly hopes, however, to avoid emulating his alter ego’s convoluted love life. “Danny married a girl because she tried to commit suicide,” says Damian. “She was pregnant. She ended up losing the baby, and we”—he is into his TV persona now—”split. My character has been in love with this girl named Cricket on the show. But she’s not into me. She was in love with her half brother.”
David Essex likewise experienced a kind of identity crisis when he played the rockstar in Stardust. When filming concert scenes, the audience had to be reminded to shout the character’s name and not Essex’s name. He found it very disconcerting.
Side Note: It’s no surprise to me that both Damian and Essex have had great success in the theatre. Essex, an aspiring jazz drummer, was discovered doing Godspell. Damian had a critically acclaimed run in Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat in the early 1990s. Both are clearly hardworking and love what they do, so it’s not easy for me to tear down a song that shaped both their careers.
In another interview, Damian admits that he didn’t initially intend for the song to be used for a movie, that he recorded it for his “own reasons.” His brother sent the tape of Damian’s cover without his knowledge to Mark Rocco who directed Dream a Little Dream. Rocco wanted that version for his film. I emailed Damian through his official fan club because I wondered why he originally recorded it. Why this song? I did not ask: What would the 1989 song have been for you if it had not been made the centerpiece of a really bad movie and a similarly bad music video?
I have yet to hear back from him.
Would it change the way I feel about the song?
Probably not: Michael Damian’s “Rock On” does not work for me because it is trying too hard to be all things 1980s as the decade was coming to a close. Perhaps, in that way, the song works as a tribute to a decade that sometimes dressed itself up in the 1950s. Two movies that express this nostalgic urge, ones that immediately come to mind, both involve time travel taking the characters away from the 1980s and to the 50s:  Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) and Back to the Future (1985). There are many more movies and television shows that truck in this nostalgia, this mythologizing of the 1950s as a simpler time when it damn sure wasn’t.
“Rock On” attempts a harder edge in contrast to the softer and gentler 1950s (again, a dangerous myth) but ends up resembling the poppier attempt at toughness as shown by New Kids on the Block’s “Hangin’ Tough.” As an eleven year old who could get pregnant, I had to cultivate my own toughness. I learned to hit early and hit hard enough to almost break my hand when groped, to let my ability to fight back dictate my reputation in a very small town.
I was not going to be that “blue jean, baby queen” in the song. Maybe that’s why Toni Basil’s 1981 cover of “Rock On,” one among the many covers I heard for the first time just weeks ago, is the only one that works for me. It’s punchier. It just goes for it. I buy every single word she sings. Its badassery is believable. Its 80’s new wave ethos sounds fresh because it distills the beginning of a new decade’s urgency. It’s not tired of its tried and true tricks of sound and sense.
“Rock On” is a song that doesn’t quite know what it is. And maybe that’s the point. We don’t know where to go from here, and perhaps we didn’t know in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell, the year of Tiananmen Square, just all of us waiting there at the ass-end of the decade. The 1960s were waiting for us to get nostalgic over them, and we did with a Woodstock revival and Forrest Gump. But, in 1989, there was also me, sitting there at eleven years old, dressed up in a nostalgia I didn’t feel, the first one in my class to hit puberty and hit it hard. Maybe the awkwardness of “Rock On” was the next level awkwardness I was experiencing, and I didn’t like it reflected back at me.
Perhaps my generation (whatever you want to call it) was moving beyond the 1950’s nostalgia even as we were born into it. In 1978, the year I was born, Grease premiered (and it was later released on VHS in 1989). Happy Days, first aired in 1974, the year my mother graduated from high school, was going strong through the early eighties. As a child, I regularly watched it with my parents and grandparents well into syndication.
Elvis Presley died on my parents’ second wedding anniversary, August 16, 1977. My mother would have been three months pregnant with me, nervous about carrying a baby to term after two miscarriages in the past year. In 1978, we lived in an old farmhouse on land my dad worked. My mother never really got into disco, she said, because she was poor, rural, and busy with babies. She listened to old country-western radio and played Patsy Cline, BB King, Elvis, and The Commodores on the few eight-tracks she owned. These were the songs of my early childhood.
There’s a concept known as “the nostalgia pendulum” used to describe the frequency in which nostalgia runs, when old trends become popular again (and therefore manufactured, hence consumable). This is not a new theory. Some believe nostalgia runs on a roughly 30-year continuum. Adam Gopnik theorizes 40 years with some “epicycles” occurring within that run. What many of these theories sometimes neglect to mention is that “nostalgia” was originally used all the way back to the eighteenth century to describe homesickness in sailors. It was a sickness. It was a sickness. It was a longing for home. This can be the basis for great art, but can nostalgia be taken too far and make bad art? Can it be used for propaganda? It sure as shit can.
But, I’m getting away from myself. That’s beyond the scope of what I’m trying to do here, staring down middle age and writing about a song made almost thirty-one years ago when I was entering adolescence. I have no nostalgia for the late 1980s or the first half of the 1990s for that matter. Perhaps nostalgia is for people whose growth didn’t outpace their age, who felt of their age and not outside of it. Hell, maybe I’m not a fan of “Rock On” because I am not a very nostalgic person. Nostalgia relies on the account of good memories collecting more interest than the bad ones as the years pass. And in 1989, my best memories were still to come (and even now, ongoing), just waiting for me beyond that age of confusion, an age perhaps mirrored best in the mess that was 1989’s “Rock On.”

Lee Anne Gallaway-Mitchell in 1989, her fifth grade school photo. Lee Anne’s mother believes her daughter is the only person in the world who can pull off a mullet. Thanks, mom.

laura cj owen on “lady in red”

Yes, I’m going there, right at the jump: The Lady in Red and the Holocaust

On a road trip with a friend in my twenties, I put The Lady in Red on a playlist, only to be vetoed by my friend.
“No, absolutely not,” he said. “I can’t listen to that song.”
     It had been a beloved song of his grandparents. And then, on a teenage trip to Europe, fatefully: a somber trip to Auschwitz. The bus rolled away from the site. The teenagers sat, in contemplation of the horror at the heart of civilized humanity. The Lady in Red rolled on over the bus speakers.
And so my friend wept. The Lady in Red played, as Auschwitz receded into the darkness. He thought about his grandparents, alive to dance on their anniversary. And The Lady in Red sat in his music, to be deployed on very carefully, and cautiously, and on the right occasion.

Well, now, that’s not fair, Laura, you might say. You didn’t have to go dragging the Holocaust into this. You might have left the grandparents out of it. Of course any song could develop associations like that.
It doesn’t have any bearing on the quality of the song, you might say.
You would be very wrong about that.

I would argue that The Lady in Red is not a bad song and I object strenuously to its inclusion on a list of the supposed bad. But it is quite a cheesy one, and I think it might even qualify as camp.
Cheesy and camp are often used synonymously for bad, but that is a foolish and superficial understanding.

Notes upon Notes on Camp

The theme of the Met Ball last year was “Camp.” Mostly, this seemed to result in a lot of celebrities wearing feathers, and a lot of arguments about what “Camp” meant.
As Sontag writes in her 1964 Notes on Camp, “Many examples of Camp are things which, from a ‘serious’ point of view, are either bad art or kitsch.”
But but but:

When something is just bad (rather than Camp), it’s often because it’s too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn’t attempted to do anything really outlandish. (“It’s too much,” “It’s too fantastic,” “It’s not to be believed,” are standard phrases of Camp enthusiasm).

Pure Camp

The Lady in Red is I think, an example, of “pure Camp,” or better: “naïve Camp,” in which is the “essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails.”
The Lady in Red is not the ironic, self-aware type of camp. It’s not winking or post-modern.
It’s just truly and purely and earnestly and sweetly, A Little Bit Much.
What or why is Chris de Burgh (and oh my gosh! That name! He was born Christopher John Davison! That’s such a bold choice!) pronouncing Dance like Dauuunce, so that in fact the word no longer rhymes with Romance? WHICH IT WOULD OTHERWISE RHYME WITH?  I mean, commit one way or the other! If it’s Dauuuunnncee than surely it’s Romaaaauuuuuuunce?
Why oh why does he earnestly whisper I love you at the close of the song, a move so earnest that its effect is about as romantic as a fart in bed?
And its synthetic sound! It was like the song was grown in a lab. Like it was written on a karaoke machine. Like the 1980s themselves took on sentience.
It’s too fantastic. It’s not to be believed.
I love it so much.

Sontag:

Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation—not judgement. Camp is generous. It wants to enjoy.

The most annoying song of all time

And yet the song is certainly, um, divisive! According to Wikipedia:

The song tends to divide public opinion…It was voted the third worst song of the 1980s by readers of Rolling Stone. [5] It was chosen as the sixth worst love song of all time by Gigwise, who said "it is destined to grate on you at weddings forever more". [6] …

I feel like you don’t end up that high on the worst list because you aimed too low! The Lady is Red is not Sontag’s Classic Bad, insufficient in ambition, boring and banal: it is DESTINED to grate FOREVER. That sounds impressive to me!
Check this:
It was voted the tenth most annoying song of all time in a poll commissioned by Dotmusic in 2000. It was one of only two singles in the top ten which were not novelty songs. [4] 
That’s quite impressive, no? To end on up on a list with the Teletubbies?
(Upon looking at the list, “The Lady in Red” is 10th, following by Bill Ray Cyrus’ “Achy Breaky Heart,” a song I also passionately defended. Is this like one of those moments in therapy when you realize the problem is actually you?).

More detractors

Neil Norman of The Independent argued in 2006: "Only James Blunt has managed to come up with a song more irritating than Chris de Burgh's 'Lady in Red'. The 1986 mawkfest—according to De Burgh—has reduced many famous people to tears…The less emotionally impressionable, meanwhile, adopt Oscar Wilde's view on the death of Little Nell—that it would take a heart of stone to listen to 'Lady in Red' and not laugh." [8]
Well, first of all, NORMAN the song is called “Lady in Red” but rather “The Lady in Red” a fact I JUST LEARNED when GOOGLING it TODAY.
And secondly how DARE you compare it to “You’re Beautiful.”
How dare you.

I have never seen you looking so lovely

The Lady in Red, I would argue, is not a song about seeing some lady, like, on the subway and thinking she’s beautiful.
It is a song with a certain fantasy vision of love.
It is a song about the bright perfection of certain memories.
It is kind of a bummer, despite being about those things.  
It is a song, I would argue, about marriage.
Chris de Burgh wrote the song about his wife, which may be why it has a real strong crying-over-your-grandparent’s forty-year-marriage-vibe about it.

Call it low-self-esteem, call it what it you will, but I never had any strong ambitions about to meet a potential partner and have them exclaim You’re beautiful! (You’re beautiful, it’s true!).
I pretty much gave up at any early age expecting any poems about how I was the most beautiful woman in the world, and I always found that genre of love expression tremendously irritating, in poem and song form. They always seemed problematically objectifying—you don’t even know this woman, Petrarch/Romeo/James Blunt, I always found myself thinking. So what if she smiled at you in the subway? You don’t know anything about her! This is not about her.
“He thinks I’m the most beautiful girl in the world,” a friend gushed to me in high school.
He definitely does not, I remember thinking, as always, ungenerous.

The Lady in Red comes from the opposite perspective of a creeper in the subway projecting onto you. The song suggests, in fact, that the beloved has never looked as well as she did this one particular night.
It has a You Clean Up Nice! feel.
It suggests the speaker looks particularly lovely this particular night because she’s wearing something particularly flattering and has done up her hair differently. It’s the exact reaction you occasionally mysteriously get when you find that one shirt that just works, when one day your hair happens to cooperate.
It comes from a place of knowing, an assuming that the speaker and subject of the song know each very well, and assessing from a place of intimacy:

I've never seen you looking so lovely as you did tonight
I've never seen you shine so bright…

And I have never seen that dress you're wearing
Or the highlights in your hair that catch your eyes

It’s simple and a little stupid, but the language of the song mimics the expressions between long time couples or friends: Do I know this dress? Have you worn it before? Did you do something different with your hair? I like it! It comes from a place of familiarity and knowing: no bolt from the blue, no, wow, who is this Sexy Stranger, but rather:
I know you, and I didn’t know you could look like this.
     It’s the third act of a billion movies—the dolt who suddenly sees their best friend in A Different Light, the couple who breaks up only to see each all gussied up at The Big Event (and realize they’ve made a Big Mistake), and the ordinary little happy ending of your long term partner saying, Hey, you know? You look really nice today. Do I know that top? Is it new?
Chris De Burgh does not suggest that you are the most beautiful woman in the world. He suggests, simply: Wow. Who knew?

And I have never seen that dress you're wearing

Sings Chris De Burgh,

Or the highlights in your hair that catch your eyes
I have been blind.

Probably every song has a moment that is 99% of the reason you like it, the part that the whole song is really About, and for me, it’s the I have been blind moment.
“Here’s the deal, Laura,” the Universe might say to me, at any given moment. “I know you really love Romantic Comedies and Romantic movies. But you have to choose: you keep the I have been blind moment of The Lady in Red, but you have to lose 90% of all the Romantic Comedies and Romantic movies in general in a Thanos-snap elimination style and—”
     “I choose the I have been blind bit of The Lady in Red,” I would answer, interrupting whatever abstract Universal Being had offered me this strangely specific deal.
And I would! Sorry not sorry, famous When Harry Met Sally speech “when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with someone” blah blah! See yah when I see yah “I’m just a girl” speech from Notting Hill. Sorry, Jane Austen’s cinematic adaptations. Peace out Colin Firth in a cravat or sweater.
     They are all basically saying the same thing.

Dancing to no music

“The essence of Camp,” write Sontag “is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.”
When I got married, I hadn’t yet realized I was losing my hair. There was less of it than there used to be, but I hadn’t really become overly worried as of yet. I was too preoccupied with planning a wedding, working, various urgent distractions of life
     The professionals did good work on me that day, I thought: a professional did the make-up I’ve never felt confident in applying. For once in my life I’d obsessed about all the aesthetics I never felt worth the time usually, taking excessive amounts of care in picking out exactly the right dress, even driving hours to a different city entirely when four wedding shops in my town didn’t turn anything up.
On the day, my wedding photographer really annoyed me by really diligent at her job. She wanted to have an exhaustive list of different groupings of guests, in the wedding party and outside of it. She insisted on taking all these pictures after the ceremony, and not just of me and my guests, but just of me and my husband! In all these different poses and combinations, and she kept not being satisfied and trying different poses and trying to get us to RELAX and I was really annoyed because I just wanted to get inside and actually enjoy my wedding! Lady we designed a specialty cocktail and picked out the apps specially! I want to go to my party! I kept thinking. I’m not one of those basic brides that’s just all obsessed with the pictures. I want to enjoy the actual experience! AUTHENTICALLY.
Before the ceremony, we even did the most staged photoshoot of all: the dress reveal, when the groom sees the bride in the dress for the first time. I’d always hated this and harbored a secret disdain for the grooms who get all emotional upon seeing their brides for the first time, who drop their mouths open or who dabble away tears.
It always seemed overly performative and, like, Stealth Patriarchal: she’s not a surprise gift from her family to yours—you know what she goddamn looks like! And why is that it’s always the dudes who get so emotional over the woman’s appearance? What’s that about? Why do girls never weep to see their guy in a tux? Why is there no tux reveal? Why is it always about how the girl looks (“You’re beautiful, you’re beautiful, it’s true…”)?
     My husband solidified himself as being a great match for me but being totally sweet about the dress reveal but also being a little awkward with it. No weeping. No good pictures were taken in that moment. We both tried clumsily to please the wedding photographer but felt she was really putting us through our paces and we itched to leave.
Upon reflection: Our wedding photographer was completely right, and we were completely wrong. 
     The pictures are great. They don’t at all reflect our awkward posing, or our desire to bolt and go get a cocktail and gossip with an out of town friend, even if those things were technically The Truth. The photos are bright and lovely, composed, if a bit cliché; we seem more relaxed than we were and more beautiful than we are. They are ever so slightly photoshopped.
And they’re the philosophical truth, if not the actual truth, of the day.
Because that’s how we felt that day, even if not at the exact moment the photographs were being taken. We were happy and we felt beautiful—we just didn’t have the aesthetic skill or tolerance for cheese to pose ourselves into a visually pleasing snapshot.
And now the photographs last, preserved and curated little memories, because someone took care and time with them and wasn’t fussed, like me, about seeming basic. And because images and art are more powerful than our feeble little human brains, we now rely on the pictures, and use them to preserve the day, and honestly thank god some professional took the time to annoy us into taking them.
My husband’s favorite picture is one taken after the semi-failed dress reveal—we’re pretending to dance, wrapped in each other’s arms, smiling, semi-ironically, as we dance to imagined music, a better shot than any at our real first dance
That’s what you get, after a wedding, that’s the point: you get the pictures, and you goddamn cling to them, because they’ll last longer and be better than memories. They will be the memories.
     Because sometimes, artifice is the point. That’s what wedding planners and appreciators of camp and The Lady in Red know: you go big, you don’t fuss about cliché, you turn up the synthesizers, and you grate the fuck out of all the cynics, forever.

For our actual first dance, my husband and I danced to The Magnetic Fields’ “The Book of Love,” a move that apparently annoys its writer, Stephen Merritt, which only serves to make my contrarian heart happy.

The book of love has music in it,

Stephen Merritt sings

In fact that’s where music comes from
Some of it is just transcendental
Some of it is just really dumb

Some of it, I’d argue, is both.

It’s not a wig, it’s my hair

I got really into camp when I realized I was losing my hair. A really fun element of losing your hair is that everyone tells you that you’re going crazy, and that you look exactly the same, a fact which you know to be incorrect, but it’s simply the case that no one will ever observe you, ever look at you as knowingly, as you do yourself.
Another fun element of losing your hair is that it’s not supposed to happen to you, as a woman. Women are supposed to keep our hair forever—this is supposed to be a key criterion that differs our experience of growing older from that of the experience of men. But like many aspects of the gender binary, it turns out there’s no truth to this dichotomy at all, and women lose their hair all the time: through genetic hair loss, age or hormone-related thinning, or autoimmune conditions, in my case lichen planopiloris, a slow-creeping alopecia, in which the body starts to mistakenly attack the hair as foreign, scaring the hair follicle so nothing can grow back in its place.
Losing your hair erases any illusions that you don’t care about appearance, and that is beneath you, inauthentic, to care about appearance and artificial enhancements to your body, that to care about such things—hair, wigs, make-up, etc.—is to be somehow non-authentic, not really you.
Since starting to lose my hair, I’ve become obsessed with watching drag queens and pop stars, campy, glorious people who routinely alter their appearance, wear wigs. It’s freeing, the notion that it’s all performance, anyway, all artificial, so who cares? That the whole deal—being a woman, being a person—isn’t so much a thing that just is, as something you decide to enact and signify.
It’s not a wig, it’s my hair
You like my hair? Gee Thanks, Just bought it!
I recite these things to myself, practicing for the day when I’ll really have to say it, to believe it.
When they get honest, Hollywood celebrities talk about the fact that bleaching and extensions fries the hair of most famous people irrevocably, meaning that everyone in Hollywood, practically, wears a wig by the time they’re thirty.
I love this fact, and cling to it, when observing the hair of those on my screen and page, all the actors and performers: it’s all fake, I say, like a prayer, in incantation: it’s all fake it’s all fake it’s all fake it’s all fake.
Getting older is, I think, a process of progressively becoming more artificial: dying your hair, replacing bits of you with metal and plastic, simulating functions with pills.
That’s the other thing that makes me feel better about losing my hair: it was also going to happen anyway, right? I was always going to get older. I was always going to lose things. I was always going to be unrecognizable to my younger self.
Life is basically a constant process of getting older and uglier than your wedding pictures.
It was all, always, going to go away, anyway. I just had deal with that a little quicker than usual.

I never will forget

Chris de Burgh says he wrote The Lady in Red about meeting his wife for the first time, in response to the realization that most men said they couldn’t remember what their wife had been wearing the first time they’d met, though he did, vividly.
This is interesting, because it means there’s an odd collapse of time happening in the song.
     He sings it, as I’d always loved, like he knows the object of the song, like they’ve never looked more beautiful before. But really he’s talking meeting his wife, so he’s sort of saying, sort admitting, that she never looked more beautiful than that first moment, at least in his mind:

I've never seen you looking so gorgeous as you did tonight
I've never seen you shine so bright, you were amazing
I've never seen so many people want to be there by your side
And when you turned to me and smiled, it took my breath away
And I have never had such a feeling
Such a feeling of complete and utter love, as I do tonight

So that moment, it’s not happening in the moment, it’s in reflecting back on what’s happened before, and saying that was it! That was the moment! And it’s gone! And never again! It’s kind of weird, because he’s saying: when I met you, you looked the most beautiful I’ve ever seen you, and I’ve never felt that way again.
Which is, sort of true, right? It’s why couples endlessly revisit the story of how they met, repeating it over and over again, a snapshot that gets more removed from the details of reality with each passing year. It’s the wedding pictures that can be never be matched. Those moments, they never do come again, and we never do have such a feeling, such a feeling of complete and utter love, because we don’t have that feeling every day, right, being married is not the story of meeting, it’s not a moment, not a night. That doesn’t last. Which is why it’s very, very important to remember those moments, those snapshots.
Forever, say most love songs. Forever and ever.
     Never, says “The Lady in Red.” The word “never” is repeated eleven times!
I’ve never had. I never will. I’ll never forget.

But also: the song is happening in the moment. It’s a reflection of the past, but it’s also told in present tense.
If I had to pick a second favorite moment of the song, it would be this:

The Lady in Red, [pause] is dancing with me

And that’s it, that’s all.
Because that moment is in the present tense. It’s the pause of oh my god I can’t believe this is really happening of getting together with someone, which is probably why I loved the song in middle school (I wanted things to be actually happening, you know?). And it’s also the pause of consent: the speaker is not just creeping on Lady in Red from a distance, watching her be the life of party, putting all that can’t-believe-that-bitch-is-with-another-man-James-Blunt-Petrarch-energy into it:
No, she’s into it! She likes him!
     It’s just such a consensual song. He’s not asking her to dance! She’s dancing with him! He’s not dancing with her. It’s just so goddamn amazing she agreed!
I love that so much.

But the present tense is also the forever-present feeling of being in love, which is this: while it’s melancholy that the moment will pass, and so we must obsess, remember it, try to remember every detail (I never will forget, sing Chris de Burgh, committing the color of the dress his future-wife was wearing to memory), it’s also, always happening.
The lady in red is dancing with me. Present tense. And even if I’m looking back, and thinking about how beautiful my future life looked that night, and how it was strange, and brighter than usual experience, and how I’ll always remember it: then on some level: it’s also always happening. When you’re in love, even long-term, married love, on some level, if you remember it: The lady in red [pause] is always dancing with you.
When you’re married a long time, it’s a strange collapse of time, I’ve realized. You love the person you met, and the person you married, and the person you’re with now, and in some ways, when they look at you, you’re still always the person they met, the person they married, and the person you are now, too, all at the same time, even if there are objective losses: hair gone, weight gained: truthfully, the person dancing with you now, they look different than the person in the picture. But by being together, you preserve all that, all those different slices of self, all the pictures, all those memories.
You have to work hard, and you have to try to remember, but if you do, it’s always still there, happening somewhere.

The lady in red is dancing with me, cheek to cheek
There's nobody here, it's just you and me

I have to remind myself: you’re lucky, if you even do get to be old, at all. Better to be part of an old couple, dancing.  Even if you lose all your hair. Even if you have to be old before you want to. Even if actually, really bad things happen and life is cruel and disappointing. You’re lucky if you even get to old, trying not to forget the day you met your partner, and what you were wearing. To be part of that old couple, dancing at the wedding.
So much better that, when there’s so much worse out there, all the reasons we cry on the bus, the darkness stretching out away behind us, while The Lady in Red comes in over the radio.

I told you it got dark

Okay, it’s hard to know how to end this essay, perhaps because the song itself ends so badly, that whispered fart of I love you. Whispering! In a pop song! It never goes well. Talk about failed sincerity. Talk about saying the quiet part loud! Yes, sir, it’s a love song, WE GOT THAT IMPRESSION.
I take it as a useful reminder, not to take it all so seriously, not to weep too hard (and yes, I cry upon ever relisten) over a song that ended up on a list of Most Annoying Songs alongside “The Teletubbies say Eh-Oh.”
     But perhaps that’s what makes “The Lady in Red” so Camp and beloved (by me) and also so high on the bad lists: it fails.
“A work can come close to camp, and not make it, because it succeeds,” writes Sontag.
“Neither can anything be Camp that does not seem to spring from an irrepressible, a virtually uncontrolled sensibility. Without passion, one gets pseudo-Camp—what is merely decorative, safe, in a word, chic.”
     Maybe “The Lady in Red” works for me, because it fails: it’s passionate and sincere and also cheesy and artificial and uncontrolled and really, really dumb in parts.
No one would ever call it chic. But then no one would ever call me chic, either. And I don’t think our inner selves are ever particularly chic; our inner lives tend to always be irrepressible, uncontrolled, passionate, an embarrassing whisper into the synthesized darkness:

I love you.

Laura Owen lives in Tucson, Arizona.