Yes, Son, There Was a Time When We Weren't Ironic

836. VILLAGE PEOPLE, "In The Navy"
Produced by; written by
Casablanca 973 1979 Billboard: # 3

College students and intellectuals--is there really any difference?--are always ironic, but American culture wasn't really reflexively ironic until the 1980s at the earliest. I'm tempted to date the turning point as the beginning of Late Night with David Letterman. One thing I know for sure is that it didn't begin with Bob Hope.

Most people under the age of thirty don't remember this, but if you grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, television was regularly punctuated by variety specials hosted by, among others, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope. As one worked through childhood and adolescence, one of the fun things about watching these specials was seeing how those two showbiz veterans tried to stay "current." One can only repurpose Kathryn Crosby and Martha Raye so many times. I remember being as riveted by Der Bingle's duet with David Bowie on his last Christmas special as a teenager as I am to this day. But then again, there was the time Ol' Skinose tried to incorporate the Village People into his act.

It was pure 1940s radio: there's a new single to promote, and the established host works the act in question into his variety show. The only thing was the act in question was the Village People, and this particular Hope show was filmed live on an active-duty US Navy aircraft carrier. On the one hand, it was perfect; on the other hand, it was a built-in collision.

This is another one of those cases where I haven't had the guts to hunt up the inevitable YouTube clip. As a teenager, I remember the seamen in the audience being stonefaced, even menacing, as the VP went into their act. Odds are, there were probably a number of closet cases among them, but many were probably plain old het homophobes. The thing was, the guys in that audience (who were probably almost exactly my age, come to think of it) got the joke that Bob Hope didn't. They knew the song was saying they were all gay, whether they admitted it or not; Hope thought it was a bouncy little tune with a nautical theme, even though he had been playing "swish" for laughs for decades by that point. He was listening to the choruses; they were noting the release.

Okay, I may be overemphasizing this particular instance. A few years later, "Born in the USA" would be read in the same exactly opposite way. Even as recently as ten years back, the real YMCA was using the Village People's homocelebratory song about it to promote its clubs. Still, even as soon as ten years later, I'm not sure that something so unknowing would have happened.

What You Gonna Do?

74. THELMA HOUSTON, "Don't Leave Me This Way"
Produced by Hal Davis; written by Kenny Gamble, Cary Gilbert, & Leon Huff
Tamla 54278 1977 Billboard: # 1

Some might say that all disco anthems were the same. If that was true--and I'm not sure it was--then this song was the epitome of disco anthems, somewhere between the early rousing pathos of "Touch Me in the Morning" and the heedless empowerment of "I Will Survive" (both of which I will be getting to later on in the thousand). Houston sounds so frail and wounded at the beginning of this record, soulful but hurting; much more convincingly abject than Gloria Gaynor ever could sound. But she picks up steam with the arrangement, to the point where, a minute or two in, she starts challenging her interlocutor and calling him out, almost calling him chicken the way Shannon would in "Let the Music Play" and Madonna in "Into the Groove" a few years on. Some of the credit has to go to the incredible pop pedigree behind the record (Davis, Gamble, Huff, et al), but much of it goes to Houston herself. Like many other successful records in its genre, this one demonstrates that, in its prime, disco was only a latin hustle away from the high drama of musical theatre.

Apres Deluge

993. PET SHOP BOYS, "Go West"
Produced by Pet Shop Boys and Stephen Hague; written by Henri Belolo, Jacques Morali, and Victor Willis
EMI 58084 1993 Did not make pop charts

. . . because, of course, things do come after.

In the fourteen years that passed between the Village People's original recording of "Go West" and the Pet Shop Boys' remake of the song, a number of things had changed. For one thing, by the 1990s it was clear that the digitized world of disco, which so many straight white male rock fans had assumed was just a passing fad, was here to stay. We sometimes speak of "disco" and "techno" as if they are two different forms of music, but they're really just two stages in the evolution of a single form, just as "rockabilly" and "surf music" are two stages in an evolution that would eventually lead to "punk." The transformed use of digital tracks in dance music during the 1980s was almost like the transformed use of the electric guitar in pop during the 1940s. In both cases, it took at least a decade for the technology to become more familiar, more sophisticated, and more responsive to artists' needs. By the end of the 1980s, artists had learned to envision their singles digitally from the first moment of conception, rather than simply adapting their pre-digital ideas for a single to the new technology (as many writers and producers had done during the so-called "disco" era).

Of course, the other major change to the social milieu of dance music during this 1980s was the impact of AIDS. We will never know if a disco star like Sylvester, for example, could have staged a successful comeback in the 1990s, because he died in 1988. He had apparently contracted his illness quite early in the epidemic, before AZT and assorted drug cocktails made living with HIV more than just a wish and a hope. In the retrospective glance of the 1990s, the late 1970s came to be seen by some as a golden age for dance clubs as well as gay men. A certain measure of 70s nostalgia took hold in the 90s, just as some 50s nostalgia had taken hold in the 70s, although the iconography of pre-AIDS disco has no single equivalent to Don McLean's mythic Day the Music Died.

But this Pet Shop Boys track is not about nostalgia. Like the original recording of the song, it's about looking forward, into the future. In fact, this version makes me think even more of Horace Greeley than the Village People's original did. Neil Tennant's voice--for once not ironic, this time sweet and merely wistful--takes in the loss of the last fourteen years but also the tentative progress, the greater acceptance (particularly in the realm of upper-class consumption) and the greater visibility of openly gay men and lesbians in the U.S. and Europe. Not that the march from 1979 had been one uninterrupted celebratory parade. As it turns out, there was a great deal to stop us now, but there was also, in the midst of all the gloom, a measure of hope.

Being the former music critics that they are, the Boys can't stop at just that, though. This track is also obviously meant to make us think of the future of post-Soviet, rapidly capitalizing Russia. This theme is more obvious if you see the wildly imaginative video for the song, but you can hear it in the single too, in that gruffly fortified male chorus in the background, which seems ready to break into the Song of the Volga Boatman at the drop of a beaverskin hat.


In fact, although I've never read anything to confirm this, I've always thought that this particular single must have been inspired by Tony Kushner's Angels in America, even though the National Theatre's production of the play's second part ("Perestroika") in London almost certainly premiered after this was all laid down. But the way that this version of the song explicitly links western migration in the U.S., the fate of the former USSR, and the future of gay men's love is just too close to Kushner's conception of late twentieth-century history to shake off. As Kushner's Harper Pitt says in the penultimate scene of "Perestroika," "Nothing's lost forever. In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead." That's exactly what Neil Tennant sounds like on this track: longing and dreaming, moving forward assuredly, hand in hand with his partner, while looking over his shoulder at all the loss in his wake.

In Longtime Companion, one of the first fictional films to treat the early years of the AIDS epidemic, there is a scene late in the film, set at a GMHC fundraiser, in which a string quartet plays a pseudo-classical arrangement of "Y.M.C.A." I've never liked that performance, because it's too tame, too sad, too resigned to "settling down"--which is, of course, something entirely different than "committing." Personally, I would have loved it if Mike Nichols had ended his miniseries version of Angels in America for HBO with this Pet Shop Boys track playing over the end titles. That would have sent me off in the right spirit. As HIV-positive Prior Walter says in the last lines of Kushner's epic, "You are all fabulous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you: More Life. The Great Work Begins."

Walking in Central Park, Singing after Dark

330. ROLLING STONES, "Miss You"
Produced and written by Mick Jagger & Keith Richards (aka "The Glimmer Twins")
Rolling Stones 19307 1978 Billboard # 1

This is a ghost story, pure and simple, and the spirit in question is a love that's going or gone, quite possibly because of the singer's own actions. If you want to be narrowly biographical about it, it may be about the slow dissipation of Mick's marriage to Bianca, which would still technically last two more years after the single was released. If you want to wax musicological, it may be about the slide from discotheques to disco, fed by a beat that Billy Preston allegedly passed on to Charlie Watts during the Stones' dates at El Mocambo in 1977; about how, even if you frequent 54, you can still wish you were going to a go-go the way you used to back when. But personally I've always thought that this is a song about New York, as so much of Some Girls is about that city in the odd cultural twilight of the 1970s. When Mick and Keith chose it as one of the two songs they sang at the Concert for New York two months after 9/11, I was even more convinced. This is a song about remembering what used to be, what should be, but secretly wanting to revel in the dirty truth of what is. And if that doesn't describe New York City in the late 1970s, then I don't know what does.

The Rites of The Rosebud

97. IT’S RAINING MEN, The Weather Girls
Produced by Charles Koppelman; written by Paul Jabara & Paul Shaffer
Entertainment Co 03354 1983 Billboard: # 46

True story. In the fall of 1983, I was sharing a house in Massachusetts with three other guys, all law students: a Marine going through law school on the JAG office’s dime who rented the house as a way of making a little extra for himself while dry-docked in Trusts & Estates, etc.; a Californian with a porn star moustache who hoped to make as much as possible after graduation, preferably defending seal clubbers who worked for Standard Oil--his dream, not mine; and a British ex-punk, with two fiancées, who had beaten up Billy Idol in a barfight, and who subsequently ended up serving two terms in Parliament for Labour. (I swear, on both my parents’ graves, this is a true story, gang, even though I’m not going to give any real names.)

I think the only time all four of us actually socialized together was at the end of that year, at the Marine’s bachelor party, which was held at a sad suburban strip club called the Golden Banana. Even the tequila in that place had lost the will to live. Most nights we negotiated TV usage with each other. We had HBO, but this was back in the era before the explosion of basic cable, let alone DVRs, so we were usually stuck with the three major networks. Some could tolerate Magnum, PI if the others wanted to watch it; some could tolerate St. Elsewhere if the others wanted to watch it; all of us could deal, for different reasons, with Hill Street Blues.

The 11 o’clock news, however, was a different matter. Two of us loved the President, and two of us hated him. One of the former owned the TV. As a result, we latter two (me and the Brit) often went out at 10:59 for a “study break.” The place we ended up at nine times out of ten was a bar called the Rosebud. The name had nothing to do with Orson Welles,


















or with sexual symbolism. It was just a name. The place was seedy but not sleazy, the sort of place where drug deals regularly went down but no actual violence really occurred. The front looked liked a diner, except with booze. The only food there was packets of Beer Nuts and chips—or as my roomie called them “crisps.” On both sides of that front part, there was a narrow passageway that led to a pachyderm-in-the-python sort of space where the bathrooms and dartboards were. All the way in the back, in a section that had almost certainly been added on in the 60s or 70s, were a more open bar, a small DJs booth, and a dancefloor. That was where we ended up most nights, not because we wanted to dance, but because the guys in the front all seemed like old farts. (They were probably, on average, at least ten years younger than I am now.)

Those studybreaks at the Rosebud are probably the laziest looking for dates I ever did when I was single. My roomie—oh heck, let’s give him a name: Ralph (pronounced “Rafe,” of course)—Ralph and I would talk in theory about the “birds,” we’d engage some in conversation, maybe dance a song or two with someone, but it was amazingly passive. Neither of us ever really thought about going home with any of the women that we met there, or even of getting phone numbers, he because he already had two fiancées, I because I had very little interest in bringing anyone back to that place. But we casually enjoyed being there, chatting, looking, feeling no pressure. The beer was longneck Bud, the music was stuff neither of us would be caught dead listening to, but somehow it was still preferable to the triumphal late twentieth-century March of Time that we knew was waiting for us back at the house.

Most nights, we stayed until last call, at 1 am. That fall, I swear, every night we went there, last call was the same song: “It’s Raining Men.” Obviously, something neither of us would get caught dead listening to, right? But every night that song transformed the dancefloor. Without a word, all the guys left, even the ones who were there with dates. There were only women out on the floor, they danced with each other, they danced by themselves and in their own worlds, and there were was more passion, more excitement, more sheer exuberance in the way they danced to that song than in the way they danced to all the other songs in the night combined. It was joy, but you could also easily read it as ecstatic relief. If a guy were insecure, it might give him a complex.

In an atomized, postmodern world, where one’s discriminating taste in music can often serve as an essential part of one’s identity, the music that moves someone else—especially the obviously commercial pop music that does it—can often serve as an object of disdain. My god, they like that? Nevertheless, I’ve never been able to wholly dismiss the Weather Girls. I know all the intellectual excuses that I could give myself for appreciating the song—the reasons camp could excuse my love of it, and with Paul Shaffer involved as one of the writers and arrangers, I can just go on and on about irony—but after my nights in the Rosebud, I’ve come to honestly embrace that song, not for its possibly ironic intention, but for the semi-sincerity in which those single Massachusetts women embraced it. Those nightly dances were a dream of utopia, they were ritual, my God they were practically church. I wish you could have seen them to know what I mean. The Weather Girls might have not sung to my world, but I saw that song create a community, a floor full of heterosexual women united by a feeling, and that is no mean feat. Trust me: no matter what anyone tells you, pop music isn’t easy, not on that level. God bless Mother Nature! She’s a single woman too . . .