the first round
(7) barry manilow, “i write the songs”
wrote off
(10) billy ocean, “loverboy”
131-83
and will play on in the second round
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 9.
Nevermind Barry Manilow: jordan wiklund on “i write the songs”
I
I write the songs that make the whole world sing
I write the songs of love and special things
I write the songs that make the young girls cry
I write the songs, I write the songs
Nevermind that “I Write the Songs” isn't even his song—it’s Beach Boy Bruce Johnston’s, first recorded by The Captain and Tennille, then released as a single by that silly goose David Cassidy, and finally—inevitably? inscrutably?—made famous by Manilow on his triple platinum third album, Tryin’ to Get the Feeling.
Look at that cover: bathed in crimson neon, head thrown back in musical ecstasy, his leonine locks flowing around him, it’s Barry a la Bencini, the Italian artist who made the cover, Barry il piano, Italian for softly/slowly/quietly, Barry not going gentle into that good night, as you might do when trying to get the feeling, any feeling, back again.
Nevermind that we tend to be forward-looking creatures; nevermind that we’re told not to dwell.
And nevermind that Barry—can I call him Barry?—adopted his mother’s maiden name before his Bar Mitzvah. This is the first act of Manilowian defiance: the molting of Barry Alan Pincus. Barry the present in favor of the past.
Nevermind that this is creation, too. This is genesis, part of the origin story.
II
My home lies deep within you
I’ve got my own place in your soul
Now when I look out through your eyes I’m young again even though I’m very old
Nevermind that Manilow has often stated his trepidation about “I Write the Songs.” “The problem with the song,” he writes in Sweet Life, his autobiography, “was that if you didn't listen carefully to the lyric, you would think that the singer was singing about himself. It could be misinterpreted as a monumental ego trip."
Nevermind that everyone—even Barry Manilow, circa 1987 when the book was published, circa Swing Street, his thirteenth album—probably deserves their own monumental ego trip once in a while. Manilow certainly had his—in many interviews over these many years, he cites how much success made a brat of him. He would demand rooms be cleared backstage for him. When Sinatra allegedly told him, “You’re next,” he not only took this to heart but also to head and the mouth attached to it. In a 1990 interview with Rolling Stone, he describes drinks at a Philadelphia diner with Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel, telling them, “I’m going to be the biggest star at this table,” though he respected both their music more than his own.
Nevermind that Manilow’s trepidation about his music haunts him through most interviews, and who hasn’t had the same trepidation about their work, their hobbies, their friends and homes and doddering missteps? Who hasn’t covered that trepidation in schmaltz, smoothed the edges, rounded the story a bit?
There was a lot of rounding of stories in 1976, the bicentennial. There was a lot of schmaltz, too—fireworks and brass bands, the height of the syndicated run of The Lawrence Welk Show. Disco, maybe. Vietnam was over. The feminist movement was still moving. It was time to celebrate, pop some champagne. And a-one, and a-two...
The post-war use of schmaltz also peaked in 1976**, the year for which “I Write the Songs” was awarded Song of the Year. Manilow hasn’t won a Grammy since, but there is much to be said for schmaltz, then and now.
In the kitchen, schmaltz is simply rendered chicken or goose fat typically used in frying or as a spread. “Schmaltz is the WD-40 of the kosher kitchen,” writes Michael Wes, author of Rhapsody in Schmaltz: Yiddish Food and Why We Can’t Stop Eating It, and “taste in schmaltz, as in Hollywood stars, varies from person to person.”
Not everyone is going to like it, has liked it, has even tried it. Still, he writes, “what you do with the schmaltz once it leaves is entirely up to you.”
Nevermind that Manilow gets it, that he understands the dichotomy between critical and commercial success about his music.
And nevermind that he embraces the schmaltz. Speaking to Johnny Carson shortly after his TV movie Copacabana aired in 1985, Manilow already had developed an aw-shucksian approach to interviews and to his particular brand of music. Be-ferned in the studio background, Manilow sports a short haircut far from the locks of “I Write the Songs” and an open-throated white shirt beneath a blue-ribbon colored jacket and black pants.
“Let’s talk about the television movie, it’s interesting,” Carson says in his staccato way, “I’ve read the reviews, most of them have been very good—but you said, you thought the critics, the television critics were gonna trash it—”
“Nobody’s more surprised than I am,” Manilow interjects.
“Why did you feel that way?”
You know, I—well, they’ve sort of beat me up over the years,” he says.
The audience laughs, but only after they’d already roared their approval when Carson first announced his guest.
“OK, I’m ready!” Manilow cringes, leaning back in his chair and shielding his face from some imagined blow, some TKO that never really came for Copacabana, “come on!”
Not every prizefighter wins every bout. Not every prizefighter needs to, either.
Blue looks good on him. He is no longer a newcomer to the scene, an accessory to Bette Midler. He no longer has to establish himself. His brand is maudlin, lonely hearts schmaltz, though the 80s saw him explore international music, collaborations with other mostly forgettable artists, forays into jazz and swing, that “blue-eyed soul” that helped Bowie reinvent himself. He cut his hair, lost the endless razorblade collar and slacks of “I Write the Songs.” Underneath this newfound career soloing, however, the rhythm of Manilow did not, will not change. He is still Barry Manilow; he hears the critics, notes the declining sales, laughs next to Johnny Carson.
Nevermind that he sold out Wembley, played to 40,000 people in the first open-air concert at Blenheim Palace in England. Nevermind that the Showtime special was a resounding success.
Nevermind that during this time he endowed several major universities, ensuring a musical future for untold thousands.
This is the second act of Manilowian defiance. Change is overrated. After his debut duo of Barry Manilow and Barry Manilow II, he later released two more self-titled albums, because why the hell not? Stay in your lane, even if it means critical failure. Stay in your lane—you’re a commercial success. The Fanilows don’t love you less; they love you even more.
You’re constant as gravity, you’re the rendered chicken fat soup to their souls, the fake rock (‘n’ roll) hiding the key to their hearts. You’re Barry Goddamn Manilow.
III (bridge)
Oh, my music makes you dance
And gets your spirit to take a chance
And I wrote some rock ‘n’ roll so you can move
Nevermind that “I Write the Songs” beat Gordon Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” and Starland Vocal Band’s “Afternoon Delight” (among others) for the Grammy and reached #1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 weekly list and eventually #13 on its year-end list.
Nevermind that that’s hotter than 87 other vaunted songs that year. If “I Write the Songs” were a pepper, it’d rate about 2.78 million Scoville Heat Units (SHU). That’s not hot enough to blow your head off, but still—a simple heat endures. Call him Barry Habanero, the Heat that Lasts.
Sing it with me, “Copacabana”-style:
His name is Barry
He won a Grammy
For a song scorned by many as hammy
But Barry’s out there*
Creating something
Which is more than most can say at the end of the day***
IV
Music fills your heart
Well that’s a real fine place to start
Nevermind that I came to bury Manilow, not to praise him.
Nevermind that all my early notes supported some essay about tearing down “I Write the Songs” note by note, as effectively as I could. It debuted almost a decade before I was born, and all Manilow ever meant to me was a name synonymous with mediocrity; I harbor no personal memories or connections to him or his music. I couldn’t have named three songs.
Nevermind that now at least I can name one. “I Write the Songs” is indeed a very bad song hyper-produced by professionals to hide its sugary shortcomings. Nevermind that the first fifteen seconds—tinkling piano riff buffered by a triumphant orchestral swell—tells you everything you need to know about the song, its structure, where it’s going. Though Manilow can sell it enough—he knows his way around the camera—you can’t sing I wrote some rock ‘n’ roll so you can move on the heels of a goddamned piccolo trumpet trill delivered with an avuncular finger wave and a wink to the audience. He nearly trips over the microphone cord untangling himself from the piano bench after calling upon the redemptive and transformative power of a worldwide symphony, whatever that means. Cue another finger wag.
A signifier of many of these soft contemporary classics is both A) an eager willingness to reference the song or music itself, and B) that music acts as anathema to poverty, war, drugs, loneliness or heartbreak (almost always loneliness or heartbreak), whatever ails you or doesn’t float your boat or possibly your yacht.
“Poverty, and immigrants, and dangerous—that’s where I come from,” he told Today in 2017. More Springsteen than Sinatra, Manilow grew up poor in New Jersey. His mother was a suicidal alcoholic and his father an itinerant truck driver.
Nevermind that he probably wasn’t thinking about that while performing “I Write the Songs.” That was past. That was Pincus.
Nevermind that rock has always suffered from self-referential hyperbole, especially in the 70s and 80s. Telling the audience that I put the words and the melodies together / I am Music / and I write the songs is just incredibly stupid and asks the listeners to suspend their disbelief a little bit longer than the music can actually support; listen to the imperatives of “I Write the Songs” and you can draw a straight line to the redemptive (compensatory?) phallic fantasias of Joe Elliot, Dee Snider, and David Lee Roth, et al. Presented thus, “I Write the Songs” is a bad sci-fi movie led by a feather-haired pilot named Barry in a sparkly flight suit with faux safety straps glued down his wireframe torso. The 70s were a lot of things; subtle wasn’t one of them.
So nevermind that the promise of the song cannot possibly be fulfilled by Manilow, an awkward lanky whitebread sort of guy who while ostensibly talented and naively sweet is neither the face nor certainly the fury of rock and roll, pouring forth so you can move, as the song goes; rock and roll can, and should, do more.
Mind that the compulsion to create, however, can be undeniable, the fire in the whiskey, the coldest drink on the hottest day, every day, all the time. Mind that the curiosity and stamina to craft something tangible in a world mostly unaffected and often dismissive of the act can itself be enough reason to simply keep going, that the revolution is not the flag but the collection and binding of its fibers.
This is the third and final act of Manilowian defiance—to commit completely to the creative process, to write vanilla ballad after vanilla ballad in the face of unadulterated criticism, to pen a dozen #1s and more than 40 top singles. To spit in the face of the spitters.
Mind that Manilow kept going. That he endured. That after Tryin’ to Get the Feeling and “Copacabana,” after declining record sales and a name synonymous with forgettable soft rock radio, Manilow didn’t, hasn’t stopped. He still sings. He still moves, a little, on morning shows and holiday specials, despite the haters, despite the Botox. He still, even now, writes the songs.****
V
It’s from me
Nevermind that we still haven’t answered the ultimate question—is this the worst song of March Badness?
It’s for you
It certainly could be. It checks all the Muzaky boxes, nails much of the March Badness criteria.
It’s from you
But is one more lash from the public whip going to tell us anything more about Barry Manilow, or change wherever “I Write the Songs” already rates in the March Badness Hot List of your heart?
It’s for me
Let me ask you this: do you think Barry cares?
It’s a worldwide symphony
And if he did, do you think it’d stop him?
*
** Manilow is gay. In 2014, he married Garry Kief, his manager for over 40 years. This takes chutzpah. Worried he’d alienate the Fanilows, he was, instead, celebrated.
***
He’s no Cohen or Reed
Berman or Mer-cur-y
But he’s been rockin’ his own way for half a cent-ur-y
****Harmony, an original musical written by Manilow, debuts next year.
Jordan Wiklund is from St. Paul, Minnesota. His essays have appeared in Pank, Brevity, Hobart, Fourth Genre, Blue Stem Review, and elsewhere. He once wrote a song called “Strawberry Jam” and it was awful. Find him on Twitter and Instagram @JordanWiklund.
david legault on “loverboy”
Billy Ocean won’t talk to me. I don’t know if it’s entirely his fault; my attempts at contact have been through a descending ladder of legitimacy: emails and phone calls to his talent agency, followed by letters to his record label, followed by a few unanswered DMs to a selection of the 89 people Billy follows on Twitter, followed by, I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit, a few choice comments on his Youtube channel videos. I love Billy (before even starting this project I was somewhat alarmed to see how high he was ranked in my Spotify stats) but never before have I felt such urgency that we actually speak. Perhaps it’s the occasion of the badness tournament, or my own feelings of isolation in recent months, but it matters to me that he matters to me and I don’t matter to him at all. The song “Loverboy” points to a sort of jealousy, a desire to have the unnamed lover to himself. I too am jealous for his attention, for the sort of answers only he could provide.
Truly, before this goes any further, you gotta watch this video. I know, yeah, if you’re here you’re probably already watching, or you might have listened to the song in the tournament playlist, but listen: nothing is going to prepare you for what it is you’re about to, have to, watch. We’ll get to the song, but this video is an event in itself that requires a certain reverence. Maybe dim the lights, maybe shut off your phone, make an event out of it. It is rare that a Youtube video is worthy of ceremony, but here we are: watch it, then maybe watch it one more time.
You can see what’s happening here: it’s 1984 and the last year and a half brought us Return of the Jedi and the Thriller video. We are all synth and neon and big budget excess: a remixed Cantina Scene with Billy stuck in the Phantom Zone cube with General Zod.
The Phantom Zone is a prison dimension in the DC Universe: one that exists outside of time and space, where prisoners can observe, but cannot interact. It seems as good a metaphor as any for Billy’s presence in this video, for my own attempts at asking him a very simple question: Why?
Because, in a tournament of badness, this video is the song’s only failure (albeit it a glorious one). It is an unironic “Knights of Cydonia.” It is the ambition of Star Wars by way of rejected Dr. Who puppetry. It is the image of exoticism filmed on a beach in Dorset, England.
Billy Ocean won’t talk to me. Unless it is through his lyrics, his songs. “Carribean Queen” has been my karaoke secret weapon for at least a decade: the perfect karaoke ratio of recognizable and under-used, his use of heavy breathing as lyric. “Get outta my Dreams, get into my Car” is a perfect synthesizer blast (not to mention the joy of singing the “Get in the back seat Baby!” backing vocals). The writing of this essay introduced me to his later work...surprisingly good! There’s some more traditional reggae calling back to his Trinidadian roots that have been in surprisingly high rotation at my house over the past few months
“Loverboy” is not a song of love or heritage, but of lust and unfamiliarity. It is a song about strange bodies pressed together, of wild jealousy. It’s more fun than that sort of description would suggest. The song makes a sharp contrast in the connotation of the words “love” and “lover.” The music? Synth bass lines all the way down. Orchestra hits that sound more appropriate on the NBA Jam menu screen. Synthesized grunts from the Goat-Man like those found on Ferris Bueller’s coughing keyboard.
But over all of it, Billy’s voice belts out—giving “Loverboy” the pathos it needs to feel fun and bright. Despite the setting of the scene, Billy’s voice still makes me believe in it.
Billy Ocean won’t talk to me, but perhaps that’s because, as the video begins, he is spiralling off in his prismatic cube, galaxies spinning around him. For the sake of badness, this video brings the badness in its purest form. Whether this is a song about relationships or just sex, any version of those events is corrupted by what’s seen here. Billy, can you tell me why the rider on horseback in the first shot is obviously a little person in a costume and mask different from the actor’s clothing mere seconds later in the video? Can you tell me why the main actor is goat-esque, why this creature without language is attracted to a girl not of his species? Did he come here for this girl—seemingly interested in her date, seemingly uninterested in the wretched Goat Man who just entered the bar--or is he here for anyone? Why is there a plastic 2-liter bottle at the bar, a child’s deflated bouncing toy put up on a pedestal? Why are we expected to cheer when the Goat Man starts killing everyone, dragging the girl against her will to the back of his waiting space horse? Why—when the camera pans away to the horse running on the English shore—is there only one rider?
Billy Ocean won’t talk to me. but I suspect it doesn’t matter all that much. In a video celebrating the song’s 30th anniversary, Billy explains the plot of this story, suggesting that he and the protagonist are fighting over the same girl. Suggesting that the video was a lot of fun, captured the spirit of the song. Billy, what are you talking about?
Earlier interviews tell me that Billy hated the video, didn’t understand the concept, that the fault was with the director and he was at the whim of a record label. But then again, the video’s producers won’t talk to me either.
It is hard to associate badness with anything but failure. I’ve come to the realization that a pretty significant bit of my own work derives from disappointment: the nonfiction attempt at doing something, but failing to achieve. Where fiction could be revised toward a more satisfying conclusion, my nonfiction projects always end short of original vision, all tension resulting from my attempts at bridging truth and expectation. Billy Ocean won’t talk to me, and I can’t help but take it personally.
Billy Ocean won’t talk to me, but if he did, this is what I’d tell him. That when I was seventeen years old I entered the Battle of the Bands at the Michigan Upper Peninsula State Fair as a solo act. That I had little musical talent to speak of, submitted a poorly recorded demo as a joke, and several weeks later found myself on stage in front of several hundred people. That I programmed some techno drum loops on my parents’ computer and burned them to a CD; that I played a Casio keyboard to the beat; that with the exception of some spoken word narrative between songs, the 15 minute set was almost entirely instrumental. I would tell Billy that to hide my lack of talent, I created an entire conceptual storyline, acted out on the stage by a few of my friends in costume. Billy, I dressed my friends as monsters to destroy a cardboard city; I dressed another in a robot suit to fight the monsters back. I swung a hammer in my left hand as I pecked away at some synthesized arpeggios with my right.
What I’m trying to say, Billy, is that I know what it is to produce low budget science fiction set to music. That you were asked to make a video you didn’t want to make, that sometimes there are consequences to the jokes we like to make. That your badness is remembered as an odd relic of a very specific slice of popular culture; that my own badness resulted in the only time I’ve ever seen-let alone experienced-a literal booing off of a stage. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t laugh it off, that it was more or less the best reaction my joke could have produced; I’d be lying if I said that everything under my laughter was screaming from the embarrassment, that even now I want to laugh at the absurdity while realizing how much the shame of this moment is still driving something in my subconscious. If I could share this with you, Billy, I like to think I would. But you remain painfully out of reach.
Billy Ocean won’t talk to me, but I like to think that maybe he can read this. Let one of these projects come with a happy ending and a more satisfying conclusion. Let any one of my many questions be answered, let me know that you know what it means to look back at a certain sort of badness, let me know how you can laugh about it now with the wisdom that’s come in the 30 years since. Let me know if you can finally tell me why.
David LeGault is the author of One Million Maniacs, now available from Outpost19. Other recent work appears or is forthcoming in The Rupture, Juked, and The Normal School. More work can be found at Essay Daily (where he writes an interview series on collecting) and at www.onemillionmaniacs.com. Although he calls the Midwest home, he currently lives in Prague, Czech Republic.