round 2

(12) CHARLENE, “I’VE NEVER BEEN TO ME”
ECLIPSED
(4) terry jacks, “seasons in the sun”
336-314
AND WILL PLAY IN THE SWEET 16

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 14.

The Branching Tree of Bad Decisions: Kathleen Rooney on “seasons in the sun”

During the Renaissance there was a vogue for the “paradoxical encomium,” a rhetorical jest typified by Ersasmus’ In Praise of Folly. This form of virtuosic display originated in adoxography, an ancient Greek practice of praising people, things, and conditions undeserving of praise, such as poverty, ugliness, stupidity, drunkenness, and so forth. Often semi-satirical, the paradoxical encomium was a playful transformation of negatives into positives, flaws into strengths. In other words, the paradoxical encomium could be an early formula for admiring something so bad it’s good.
This essay, though, is not going to be one of those, because “Seasons in the Sun” by Terry Jacks flat-out sucks.
The saccharine dramatic monologue of a dying man bidding his beautiful world a tearful farewell, the ominous, aqueous, jangling riff that opens Jacks’ take sounds promising, as though it might not be out of place in a Scott Walker song. Alas, then, Jacks’ twerpy voice begins to mewl followed closely by a needling organ, and within 15 seconds, the combination makes this listener think of the terminally ill narrator: Just die already. It’s a melody you can imagine coming out of a slot machine. A carousel from Hell going endlessly up and down a little too fast, never stopping to let you off.
Somewhere between 11 million and 14 million people who have bought the single worldwide would disagree with me. Released in the United States in December of 1973, the song cracked the Billboard Hot 100 in January of 1974, ascending to the number one spot by March 2 and remaining there for three weeks, after which it stayed in the Top 40 until around Memorial Day. To put that achievement into perspective, “Seasons in the Sun” is still one of fewer than 40 singles ever to sell over 10 million copies globally.
Admittedly these are awe-inspiring—and, depending on how one feels about the song, dismaying—feats. Yet, because there’s no such thing as absolute authority over aesthetic value, nor any way to establish objectively or universally whether something is bad or not, it would be futile to try to prove that Jacks’ “Seasons in the Sun” ought to be heard by every listener as awful, or that millions of people are wrong for liking it.
It would be more fun instead to study Jacks’ version’s path into existence—to make ourselves the Lomaxes of soft rock for a sec and follow “Seasons’” lines of descent. Because whatever else it does, Jacks’ take on “Seasons” provides an invaluable object lesson in how poor decision-making can diminish a particular work’s quality in a way that’s illuminating about art in general.
Before doing that, though, I confess that it’s tempting to crap spectacularly all over Jacks’ effort. Plenty of people have. The reference series Contemporary Musicians describes Jacks’ version as a “schlock/pop classic.” Schlock, of course, means cheap or inferior goods; trash, deriving from the Yiddish for dregs, dross.
In 2018, the blog Cracked Rear Viewer, dedicated “to fresh takes on retro pop culture,” called the song a “schmaltzy little ditty” and shared it with the warning “ATTENTION DIABETICS: better take your shot of insulin before clicking on the next video!”
An August 2017 article in the Australian Inquirer entitled “The Nadir of Postwar Popular Music” reported that Jacks's version “often tops lists of the worst records of the 1970s or of all time. It was once left off such a list because it was judged to be in a category of awfulness unreachable by mere mortals.”
But the same article also reminds readers that Jacks’ offering went to Number One not only in the United States, Canada, and Britain, but also “most European countries, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia, where it stayed on the charts for 27 weeks.”
And in 2015 the Canadian tabloid The Province pointed out that, “People loved it while others loathed it, usually for the same reason: Its blatant sentimentality.”
Whenever something so polarizing achieves such enduring popular resonance one wonders: how did this happen? Was it produced to specific consumer tastes? Was it an accident? What the heck?
Maybe the key for Jacks’ hit is that he originally intended it for the Beach Boys. One imagines that if Brian Wilson had not been out of commission, then perhaps he could have given it a hallucinatory fever dream feeling more innovative than Jacks’ treacly haze.
In The History of Canadian Rock ‘N’ Roll, Bob Mersereau explains that after Jacks’ band the Poppy Family—which, as its name suggests, cranked out a considerable number of pop hits—dissolved, his interests turned toward writing and production, and he began to seek out new studio gigs. He met the Beach Boys through touring, and with Brian Wilson’s mental health crisis growing more severe, “Carl Wilson and Al Jardine both asked if I would produce them,” Jacks said. “They knew I liked the Beach Boys and Brian was out of it then.” He thought that his version of “Seasons in the Sun,” could be “the smash hit the Beach Boys were looking for to revamp their stalled career.”
Unfortunately, as Jacks recalls, “None of the Beach Boys were hanging together, you had to bring them in separately. It wasn’t unified because Brian had gone crazy. It was an honor to produce them, but […] I was just turning into a nervous wreck. I said, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ I just left.” But he took the song with him, and his version found “markets most artists never heard of: Brazil, for instance, where it became the country’s top-seller of all time.”
In an interview preceding the Beach Boys’ rough cut of “Seasons”—

—Jacks’ wife and former band mate Susan Jacks asserts that part of the problem, too, with getting the Beach Boys to finish their recording was the divisive nature of the song. Her interlocutor says, “The interesting thing about ‘Seasons in the Sun’ is that’s one of those songs where you either love it or hate it. I have seen people vote that as their all-time-favorite song and I’ve seen other people say it’s the worst song that was ever written. I don’t know. That’s true of a lot of tearjerkers…” She agrees, “Oh, I know, I know, and they’re usually hits,” before sharing her version of the experience during which the Beach Boys, “went into the studio and they could never get it finished because some of the guys were really into it and some weren’t.”
So is the subsequent solo Terry Jacks version of “Seasons in the Sun” the worst song of all time? No, “My Ding-A-Ling” by Chuck Berry (repped in this tournament by the inimitable Martin Seay) is. However, part of being bad has to do with missed opportunities and dubious choices, and by that metric, Jacks’ “Seasons” is a serious contender.
How did this song get into Jacks’ hands to try to hand it to the Beach Boys in the first place, and why does his version sound so sugary when compared to its spicier source material? Let’s climb the branching tree of bad decisions and find out.

I. Brel, or, Avant Jacks, Jacques

The mawkish melt of gooey cheese that is “Seasons in the Sun” is an adaptation—or a degradation—of the Jacques Brel song “Le Moribond” with lyrics interpreted by Rod McKuen (about whom more later).
The Brel original absolutely slaps:

Compelling in its lyrics, its arrangement, and its delivery by its composer, one can see why Brel was basically the Belgian Elvis. Little wonder that musicians from the aforementioned Scott Walker to David Bowie to Joan Baez to Marc Almond to Cyndi Lauper and on and on have covered his songs.
Sarcastic and bitter, Brel’s first-person narrator is also dying and making his farewells. He says goodbye not to Jacks’ “trusted friend,” but to a specific “Emile”—“as good as white bread”—whom he knows “will take care of my wife,” a lyric whose meaning becomes more unsettling the more Brel repeats it.
The chorus, too, has a frantic quality that seems sort of shocking the first time we hear it:

I want everyone to laugh,
I want everyone to dance,
I want everyone to have fun like crazy people
when they put me in the hole.

He bids adieu, too, to the curé, or parish priest, with whom he admits that he didn’t always agree, but with whom he feels kinship because “we were seeking the same port.” He knows, again, that because the priest was her confessor, he “will take care of my wife.”
The source of the song’s intriguing unease exposes itself fully at last when the narrator makes his goodbye to an Antoine. “It’s killing me to die today while you are so alive / and even more solid than boredom” he sings in a truly sick burn. “Seeing that you were her lover,” he adds, “I know that you will take care of my wife.” The turn here reveals that this has been the nasty and impotent lament of a cuckolded husband the entire time.
At last, he says goodbye to his faithless spouse: “I go to the flowers with my eyes closed, my wife. / Seeing as I’ve closed them often, / I know you will take care of my soul.”
With its blend of macabre content and an upbeat tempo, the song is funny. We are all fools, the chorus says, and the only remedies to our folly are laughter and death.
When Brel sings, the listener senses the complete sweep of the fictional world this narrative unfolds in—Brel knows more about the milieu and its characters than the surface can show. This implication of underlying fullness enacts a musical illustration of Hemingway’s proverbial tip of the iceberg. Jacks, as will be explored below, guts the song and leaves only the tip, a lonely floe with nothing beneath.

This lack of subtext is part of why getting the Jacks after you’ve been fond of the Brel is like ordering Aperol and receiving Fanta. It’s drinkable; it’s not Drano. But it disappoints with its insipidity. Like hearing a Beethoven sonata performed by a wind-up toy, you can tell that you’re hearing a product of genius, but the mechanism delivering the song falls short of the challenge.
This listener finds Jacks’ version to be quite bad, but kind of fascinatingly extra-bad because Brel’s original is so powerful, but gets garbled almost to death in a transatlantic, international game of Telephone.
According to the best comment presently on this performance’s Youtube page posted 3 years ago by kabiriazampano3: “Jacques Brel's version is about friends and priests that he knew were doing his wife, he accepted that and recommended all of them to take care of her after his death. Terry Jacks was a version that had nothing to do with the original, american chinnese food, american pizza, american capuccino. Brel was a sarcastic poet, he went for the blood.”

II. McKuen, or, Don’t Spare the Rod

Wait, though—Jacks is not American, but Canadian. So who is the American to blame for the inferior version? Rod McKuen. Kind of.
The young and largely self-taught Bay Area singer-songwriter and poet moved to France in the early 1960s where he and Brel became fast friends. An enormous fan of Brel’s versatile and theatrical oeuvre in the genre of chanson, McKuen took it upon himself to introduce Brel’s catalog to an Anglophone audience. His version of Brel’s exemplary “Ne Me Quitte Pas”—Americanized though it is—turned that song into an international standard.
His version of “Le Moribond,” while arguably not as great as the original, is still pretty good. Significantly, McKuen altered the title from “The Dying Man” to “Seasons in the Sun,” not, obviously, because he didn’t know what he was doing, but because he did. A mindless, word-for-word translation of Brel’s lyrics would not sit well on the melody, nor would it retain the lyrical rhymes. McKuen knew that better than a translation would be an adaptation.
Looking closely at the aspects he adapts, one sees McKuen proceeding thoughtfully. One might disagree with his decisions, but would be hard-pressed to say that anything he does is mistaken or stupid:

He does lose the priest, changing him to an actual father: “Good-bye, Papa, please pray for me. / I was the black sheep of the family.”
But crucially, he keeps—and even improves upon—the cheating spouse, exhibiting that he understands the Brel song tonally; he gets the sarcasm. If anything, McKuen’s version is less sexist because he chooses to give the wife a name, while retaining the irony. “Adieu, Françoise, my trusted wife / without you I’d have had a lonely life. / You cheated lots of times, but then / I forgave you in the end, / though your lover was my friend.”
It’s not that McKuen didn’t properly appreciate Brel’s sensibility. In a characteristic and touching McKuen-esque excess of sentiment, he said that when he heard that Brel had died at the relatively young age of 49 in 1978, “I stayed locked in my bedroom and drank for a week. That kind of self-pity was something he wouldn’t have approved of, but all I could do was replay our songs (our children) and ruminate over our unfinished life together.” 
Because of his friendship with the man himself, McKuen understood that he could not do Brel as Brel. He’s not a sardonic, smoldering, jolie laide Gallic icon, but an affable, sensitive, pansexual proto-hippie. Thus, McKuen’s version—not a translation, but an interpretation—makes decisions that one might disagree with, but that are ultimately defensible. He’s doing a take, not a cover, and he wants to head in a different direction.

The Brel version, though brilliant, is a bit of a mess—as can be the case with the literate genre of chanson, its lyrics are phenomenal, but the chorus hook is not that infectious of an earworm. The experience of listening feels disturbing—you get to the end and need to review what you just heard. As a composition, it’s formally complete, but keeps pulling the listener back into the knowledge that the fucked-up situation the narrator leaves behind will continue after he’s gone.
McKuen chooses to make the song smoother and more tied-up-with-a-bow, adding a much prettier chorus, both lyrically and melodically, plugging in lyrics with a variation of vowels and consonants that render it more euphonious and hookier. When you’re done with McKuen’s version, you’re still slightly unsettled, but you’re also reassured. Instead of manically telling his survivors to laugh and dance like a bunch of crazies when they stick him in the grave, McKuen’s narrator possesses memories of “joy” and “fun” and “seasons in the sun.” A bit sanitized, yes, but “the hills that we climbed / were just seasons out of time” is smartly sad, a death-tinged admission that even sunshine goes dark and rarely comprises the bulk of a life.
McKuen’s version is not bad, just different—if anything, it reveals how flexible Brel’s song is. It shows the same dramatic situation, but through a different lens. It’s not a shot for shot remake, some CGI Lion King, but rather an homage. McKuen wants a side effect of his song to be to make the listener look back to the Brel, and if they like the original better, that’s fine by him; it’s part of his aim.  
Brel’s version is splenetic—contemptuous and comic and in no way wistful. But you can tell that because McKuen, too, plays the scenario as kind of a what-can-you-do joke, he at least gets the humor, even though he principally wants it to be a pretty song. Brel seems to be saying “I win because I’m dead”—a nihilistic, punk avant la lettre double bird extravagantly flipped. Even when he’s saying some of the same stuff as McKuen retains, he says it with a shrug, a hairflip, a big old IDGAF to life and everyone who has to remain in it. Is his song spoken from the perspective of a suicide? A person dying of natural causes? Either way, the parting shot seems to be, I’m glad I’m leaving and you’re staying here because you all deserve each other. Whereas McKuen’s version seems to conclude, Now that I’m facing death, I appreciate the time we had and I forgive you all. Mostly.
That mostly is vital to McKuen’s version’s emotional complexity, best embodied by the narrator addressing his wife:

Adieu, Françoise, it’s hard to die
when all the birds are singing in the sky.
When spring is so much in the air,
with your lovers everywhere 
just be careful I’ll be there.

Hold on, how? As a watchful spirit full of forgiving tristesse at the absurdity? Or as a vengeful ghost seeking to wreak punishment? This edgy ambiguity, along with his various other interpretive choices, cause this listener to maintain that McKuen’s version is still pretty interesting. You can’t deny that McKuen was onto something—Brel’s song is a banger and deserved to be brought over to the States.
But his decision to excise the bitter tone of Brel’s original does open the door to some weak mis-readings.

III. Terry, or, All Jacksed Up

Enter Terry Jacks by way of that door.
At times the line between genius and foolishness seems to be a fine one. McKuen may tip this piece of Brel-ian brilliance toward foolery, but remains upright, whereas Jacks comes along and pushes it right over the edge. As biographer Alan Clayson explains in Jacques Brel: La Vie Bohème, McKuen’s version is “anodyne,” but Jacks’ version is unforgivably “harmless.” “With all further what’s-the-use-of-it-all ugliness removed,” he writes, it emerges “as a sentimental lay about some old idiot’s happy memories—with ascending key changes to pep it up.”
To listen to the Jacks version is to hear him chew a substantive song into pallid bubblegum:

In the hands of Jacks, “Seasons in the Sun” has an almost polka rhythm ill-suited to the putatively sad content. Whereas the bouncy, hysterical pseudo-cheer of Brel’s version creates a pleasing yet disturbing tension of opposites, Jacks’ version grates. He permits no comedy, no bitterness, no irony, no resentment. Puritanically, there’s no cheating wife and therefore no sex. Aesthetically unforgivably, there’s no emotional complexity.
Jacks takes something that was pretty good—the McKuen version—which itself drew on something great—the Brel—and ends up with something awful. He faced two moves at his branch of this decision tree: 1) He could have climbed back in the direction of Brel, making it more complex, or 2) He could have done what he did, clambering in the opposite direction: rendering the heretofore individual speaker into a cardboard cutout.
Jacks’ loses Emile in favor of the “trusted friend.” In McKuen’s telling, the labeling of Emile as “trusted” is caustic because we still learn that Emile has been cheating with the speaker’s wife. But Jacks allows no layers; everything is exactly as it purports to be, and the friend is truly trusted. This makes his version feel brainstemmy, stupid, repugnant—one worries, if one likes it, that perhaps one likes it for fairly dumb reasons.
But, you might be saying, isn’t Jacks doing what you said McKuen did—really, what any interpreter does? Emphasizing some aspects over others? Yes, but interpretations, like originals, can still be questionable. Jacks chooses to cut or conceal the most provocative aspects of the song, which make his version a frustrating experience, even if one is unfamiliar with its source.
McKuen drifts toward the sentimental, but Jacks crashes full-steam upon the shores of kitsch. In addition to his emblandening subtractions, the one addition he does make suggests that he doesn’t trust the listener to find the deathbed scenario sad enough. No, he opts to throw in a soon-to-be-partially-orphaned daughter (with an awkward repetition of “sun” and a cliché to end the verse to boot):

Goodbye Michelle my little one.
You gave me love and helped me find the sun,
and every time that I was down,
you would always come around,
and get my feet back on the ground.

For though aware of the Brel original, Jacks chooses to manipulate the song away from idiosyncrasy and complexity toward an empty and pandering Hallmark generality. According to a 2004 article in the Vancouver Sun, Jacks knew of the song’s unsentimental origins. “Brel wrote it in a whorehouse in Tangiers,” he said. But Jacks purposely sentimentalized it in response to “a good friend of mine” who died of “acute leukemia.” Or as the Australian Inquirer put it, “Jacks returned to the song, wrangled a few more maudlin thoughts into the last verse and recorded the syrupy results.”

Worth noting is that maybe Jacks knew exactly what he was doing from a commercial standpoint. There’s always good money to be made in pandering—producing stuff that’s ostensibly art, but that soothes and reinforces the most conservative values. Jacks’ song does not confront death, not truly. His speaker has no regrets aside maybe from regretting dying, and what interesting person hasn’t got some regrets? To the extent it has anything to say, Jacks’ version says of its narrator and by extension its listener: if you think death is sad, you are having the right feelings; the decisions you made in your life were good ones, and the values you held are the best values. Cultural products that speak in such platitudes tend to fly off the shelves.
In this regard, “Seasons in the Sun” reminds me of the colossally popular Victorian sculpture “Motherless,” which I happened to see last summer in the Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow.

Formally known as “Statue of a Motherless Girl and Her Father,” the late Victorian work by George Anderson Lawson has been phenomenally well-liked since its creation.
“It’s proof that sadness can be popular,” says the wall text explaining the piece and instructing viewers where they can purchase their copy—either in the gift shop, or online. “Also available in bronze!”
But it does not prove that sadness can be popular; it proves that sentimentality and kitsch can be popular. “Motherless,” like Jacks’ “Seasons in the Sun” gives the audience not messy, multifaceted, subtle emotion but the pure spectacle thereof; it’s not sadness, it’s SadnessTM depicted and sold, yet felt not at all.
Kitsch, of course, is something of tawdry design or content created to appeal to popular or undiscriminating taste. And sentimentality is “a device used to induce a tender emotional response disproportionate to the situation at hand, and thus to substitute heightened and generally uncritical feeling for ethical and intellectual judgments.” In this way, then, both “Motherless” and “Seasons in the Sun” induce their audiences to invest previously prepared emotions disproportionately to generic situations. Upon closer examination, Jacks’ supposed sadness does not deserve the designation of sad. It’s a simulation of sadness. A representation of sadness that’s really a simulacrum that allows its susceptible listeners to believe falsely that they’ve dealt with a difficult emotion.
In the Reading and Writing Poetry class I teach at DePaul University in Chicago, we use the text Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry by David Mason and Frederick Nims. An eccentric and engaging book full of unexpected charts, photographs, and diagrams, the chapter called “The Color of Thought: Emotions in Poetry” includes this image of the Emotional Color Wheel.

“We can visualize the emotions as a color wheel like the ones we see in art-supply shops, a wheel in which selected colors are arranged, like spokes, according to their prismatic, or ‘spectral,’ order,” write Mason and Nims. “If we start blending the colors themselves, there is no end to the number we can make, just as there is no end to the number or complexity of our emotions.”

My students tend to find this visual metaphor particularly illuminating when it comes to improving their understanding of how a good poem operates. The idea of the Emotional Color Wheel becomes a shared term of class vocabulary—why, we ask, limit yourself to just one emotional color when you could potentially achieve a deeper effect through the use of two or many more? Or as Mason and Nims put the same concept in musical terms: “In most poems we get not one emotion in a solo, but rather duets or quartets or even symphonies of many emotions.”
We can apply the Emotional Color Wheel here. Brel’s “Le Moribond” is a rancorous rainbow of negative emotions cut through with bleak comedy. And McKuen’s “Seasons,” though less of a rainbow, still retains a pleasing balance of complementary emotional colors. But Jacks’ version displays a single, soppy color—self-pitying and weepy, smugly drunk on its own tears. Climbing the decision tree from Brel to McKuen to Jacks, the listener experiences a reduction in emotional interest—a leaching of emotional color from the song.
If you’re not yet convinced, I present two parting points as to why Jacks’ version of “Seasons” is pretty damn bad. First, it’s a full 30 seconds longer than the all-killer-no-filler 2 minutes and 56 seconds of the Brel original. Not only is it much worse, but there’s also more of it.
Second, lest anyone remain in doubt as to Jacks’ thoroughgoing immaturity and fatuous taste, the Inquirer reports this illuminating side-note: “Unlikely as it sounds, [“Seasons in the Sun’s”] B side is worse. Jacks reckoned he set out to record something unremarkable so as not to distract disc jockeys from what he saw as the main attraction. Loaded with puerile sexual innuendo, ‘Put the Bone In’ is ostensibly about a woman ordering dog food from her butcher. ‘I figured nobody's going to play that thing,’ Jacks said later.” If you hate yourself, you can listen to it here.
In the introduction to Permanent Red, John Berger writes:

After we have responded to a work of art, we leave it, carrying away in our consciousness something which we didn’t have before. This something amounts to more than our memory of the incident represented, and also more than our memory of the shapes and colors and spaces which the artist has used and arranged. What we take away with us—on the most profound level—is the memory of the artist’s way of looking at the world.

The branching tree of bad decisions shows that Brel’s way of looking at the world is incredibly colorful and interesting. McKuen’s is still interesting albeit slightly less so. Jacks’ way is vacant and ridiculous. And yet, and yet…
Without Jacks’ having sent his “Seasons” to such stratospheric fame, I doubt I’d be writing appreciatively about Brel’s original. I might not be aware of it at all. Nor would we have the many post-Jacks covers of “Seasons” that prove that—with the Jacks factor removed—the song still has a certain something.
Take Bobby Wright’s version, which hit the Billboard Hot Country singles chart in 1974, as well:

Perhaps because the expectation of corn is priced into country, this version is, to this listener’s ear, better. The steel guitar and strings, the slower chorus, and the slight churchiness make me wish dearly there were an Elvis cover.
And the Hong Kong pop band the Wynners’ version, also from 1974, sounds somehow superior to Jacks, with its slower tempo and more mellifluous, less whiny vocal.

On the other hand, there’s the 1999 version by Irish boy band Westlife, a Christmas #1 in the UK that year. With its synthesized flute and extreme chime curtain, it may, in fact, be worse than Jacks’:

Then again, there’s the Daniel Johnston version (unfortunately not readily available on Youtube), which doubles-down on the addition of Michelle, the little one, by having a child sing the chorus. The amateurish, out-of-phase quality feels worthy of a paradoxical encomium, so delightfully cracked it’s charming. Moreover, Johnston’s take possesses a beyond-the-pearly-gates cherubic vibe, like the narrator might already be dead—spooky and great.
So thanks, Jacques; thanks, Rod; and thanks, grudgingly, Terry, I guess, for all these sunny seasons.

Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, as well as a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She teaches in the English Department at DePaul University, and her most recent books include the national best-seller, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (St. Martin’s Press, 2017) and The Listening Room: A Novel of Georgette and Loulou Magritte (Spork Press, 2018). Her World War I novel Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey is forthcoming from Penguin in August 2020, and her criticism appears in The New York Times Magazine, The Poetry Foundation website, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago with her spouse, the writer Martin Seay. Follow her at @KathleenMrooney  

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