The new year has come and gone, and like a lot of us, it’s given me a chance to look back on what I’ve accomplished and what I’ve left undone. In other news…remember how I only did the “best” part of the Chartbusting! articles for 1978 and 1983? Each of those years provided an embarrassment of, well, embarrassment. Bad songs far outnumbered good ones, each of them with a sound that’s not so much of its time as hilariously, instantly dated. In spite — alright, alright, because — of how much they gave me to work with, I never dug into this gold mine of garbage.

Until now!

Dishonorable Mentions:
The “Disco Sucks!” phenomenon of the late seventies is even more baffling after listening to all one hundred of these singles back to back, because by and large, kitsch and all, disco was the only genre to have a pulse. If any records should have been burned in Comiskey Park, it should have been the endless deluge of sappy, sludgy soft ballads from the likes of Anne Murray, Andy Gibb, David Gates, and countless others (and we’ll be covering some of them in more depth later on). All of them, especially Murray’s “You Needed Me,” somehow manage to be both screamingly overdramatic and sleepily dull at the same time. Or maybe David Gates’ “Goodbye Girl” deserves the highest dis-honor in that category, with its screaming guitars and thudding drums (drumroll please!) trying and failing to make up for the deficits of Gates’ robotically over-processed voice, which, fittingly, has all the emotional range of HAL-9000. Speaking of processed rock product and obnoxious voices, Boston tossed out another of their assembly-line rockers with “Don’t Look Back,” and the Atlanta Rhythm Section combined a similar approach with some bizarrely masturbatory subject matter for “Imaginary Lover.” “Count On Me” combines the worst of both approaches, a mellow piano ballad without any of the excess that could make Jefferson Starship memorably great (“Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now”) or terrible (“We Built This City”), let alone the psychedelic fury of their early work as Jefferson Airplane.

Bringing it back around to disco, the genre’s Elvises (or, if you’re feeling less generous, Pat Boones), the Gibb brothers dominated the chart. The Bee Gees scored three singles, plus Barry’s guest spots on Samantha Sang’s “Emotion” and three slots for the most popular and least talented of them all with the number one song of the year, little Andy. While Barry’s falsetto could wear on me — never less than when he sang baby brother’s backup — he at least knew how to use it to good effect. And he had the beats to back (or at least cover) it up. Andy couldn’t claim even that much, digging into reheated family leftovers with a voice so bloodless I have to wonder if he hadn’t discovered AutoTune a couple decades early. And it can be easy to see why the Bee Gees resigned some of these songs to hand-me-downs. “(Love Is) Thicker Than Water” takes a common expression and mangles it beyond all recognition, treating it as a hyperbole along the lines of “Higher than a mountain,” which makes you wonder if the Bee Gees were totally clear on what water is.

The year also offered Chuck Mangione’s offensively inoffensive soft-jazz jam “Feels So Good” and Robert Palmer embarrassing himself with the whiteboy funk of “Every Kinda People” – with steel drums, yet! And not even real ones, synthesized ones! Jay Ferguson’s “Thunder Island” is dragged down by backing vocals that would be more at home in one of the following decade’s lesser Saturday-morning cartoons than anything adult-appropriate, and lyrics like “Sha-la-la-la-la my lady/In the sun with your dress undone” are no less vapid. And now, on to the worst of the worst:

5. Styx – Come Sail Away

If the ‘78 Hot 100 is packed with artists who undercommitted to their underwritten love songs, Styx overcommitted with their ridiculously overbearing rock epic “Come Sail Away.” Unable to pull the hat trick of contemporaries like Meat Loaf, their embrace of the silliness does nothing to make it more palatable because the beating heart that made better artists unafraid to look stupid just isn’t there. And it’s not like they’re not trying. Oh Lord, how they try, from the tinkly piano and synthesizers of the introduction to Dennis DeYoung’s flat overemoting to the ten-ton wall of guitars that makes up the main body of the song to the B-movie sci-fi of lyrics like “I thought that they were angels/But to my surprise/They climbed aboard their starship/And headed for the skiiiiiiies!”Where other artists were using synthesizers to create  sounds the world had never heard before, Styx was content to find ever newer and more irritating noises: the trilling of a street-vendor hurdy-gurdy, and ray-gun whoots and wheets. And the maddeningly repetitive chorus (which sounds suspiciously like “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” – “a-wimoweh, a-wimoweh, come sail away, come sail away”…) isn’t much better. The charting single version is mercifully half the length of the album version, but it would have needed to cut the song down much, much further to purge it of all this overblown nonsense. If the album version is full of pretentious prog-rock bombast, the stripped-down version still leaves the even more ludicrous bombast of arena rock. If we play loud, people will think we’re good, right? This is a song that sounded less annoying when it was recorded by South Park’s Eric Cartman. Just think about that.

4. The Commodores – Three Times a Lady

In a year of soft rock and soft ballads, few were softer than this one. The Commodores could  create the roof-rattling funk of “Brick House” or their nakedly emotional elegy “Nightshift,” and then they could churn out sludge like this. And neither of those other songs featured Lionel Richie. Coincidence? I think not! Next to “Three Times a Lady,” even “Easy” sounds like hard rock. Audiences of the era had already had plenty of the trendy new electronic keyboard (and if they were, hoo boy, the next years were gonna be rough), but this chart has convinced me that the good old-fashioned piano was an even better sign that any song accompanied by it was going to be loaded fuller with sap than a Canada maple. The nonsensical lyrics don’t help any. Richie claims they were inspired by his father’s words to his mother: “I love you. I want you. I need you. Forever.” Why he decided to translate something so poetic into “You’re once, twice, three times a lady/And I lo-o-o-ove you” is anyone’s guess. But hey, two out of three ain’t bad. That’s not the only groaner, either: the first verse is such a soppy old standby it would have gotten thrown out by Hallmark, too much for either their movies or their greeting cards: “Thanks for the times that you’ve given me/The memories are all in mind/And now that we’ve come/To the end of our rainbow/There’s something I must say out loud.” Obviously, Richie didn’t learn his lessons from Russ Hamilton. Clichés like these are scattered all throughout the song:  “There’s nothing to keep us apart,” (so love won’t tear them apart?) “The moments I cherish/With every beat of my heart.” Richie tells this triple woman how much she makes his life worth living in the unforgettable phrase “You make my life worth living,” and if he had to do it all over again, well, I’ll give you one, two, three guesses who he’d do it over with. They share dreams, joys, and pains, but apparently not notes or else this song would have gone through a lot more rewrites.

3. Rod Stewart – You’re in My Heart (The Final Acclaim)/Sometimes When We Touch
   

   The artistic transformation is a long and storied tradition in popular music: the Beatles came up as gritty garage rockers and combined that energy with radio-friendly bubblegum pop before taking a hard left into era-defining experiments. Bob Dylan went from folkie to rocker to gospel shouter and back again without ever losing his unique poetry. Stevie Wonder transformed from Motown’s own Mousketeer to a psychedelic prophet. But some transformations, like poor old Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis, are very much for the worse. And some are just inexplicable. The easy listening ballads of the year were hard enough to listen to coming from polished voices who had molded themselves to the material. But why would anyone want to hear it from the sandpaper throat of a gritty blues-rocker like Rod Stewart? His early albums, including vocals for legendary bands like the Jeff Beck Group and the Small Faces show he was at his best screaming his soul out. That doesn’t exactly prepare you for a career of whispering soft nothings, and everytime he does, his voice goes down about as smooth as a bottle of Everclear full of splinters. His most legendary stinker, “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” came out this year, but because God is good, it wouldn’t chart until 1979, so I don’t have to cover it. The songs that did make the cut give that question a pretty definitive answer, though. I mean, unless you’re into chain-smoking hound dogs. The roughness of his voice only sounds more incongruous with the pillowy soft instrumentals around it. And even once you take Stewart’s voice out, the pieces of “You’re in My Heart” have no business together, with jangly guitars and mournful fiddling plopped on top of computerized choirs and the plinking of a synthesizer that would be more at home at the local Toyland than Guitar World. And then at the end, a big screaming electric guitar gets plunked down on top of it all, apparently coming from a completely different song than either the electronic or acoustic halves of this one. The chintzy, cushiony synth score of “Sometimes When We Touch” is even more incongruous, since Rod Stewart apparently decided he could cancel it out if he gargled an extra bottle of barbed wire before recording. Stewart’s lyrics don’t do him any favors either: he fills “You’re in My Heart” with such painful rhymes as “Spinning yarns that were so lyrical/I really must confess right here/The attraction was purely physical,” “Your fashion sense, Beardsley prints/I put down to experience,” and “You’re an essay in glamor/Please pardon the grammar.” (No, that last one doesn’t make any more sense in context.) It’s hard to imagine why anyone would throw away such a gift to spend his life doing something he’s so unsuited to, but his chart success is as close to an explanation as we’re ever likely to get.

2. Debby Boone – You Light Up My Life

While it’s as full of great and bad art as any other medium, pop music has a way of rewarding mediocrity over creativity. A song doesn’t always become a hit by being memorable. More often, it just needs to be inoffensive enough to keep listeners from turning the dial — all things to everybody and nothing to anybody. At least, that’s the best explanation I can come up with for the record-breaking success of “You Light Up My Life,” the ninth-biggest song in the history of the Hot 100. It spent no fewer than ten weeks at Number One the previous year, outperforming the best either year had to offer, all while having basically no qualities whatsoever. I’m not just talking musically, either.  Joe Brooks’ lyrics are so generic that the song has been interpreted as both a hymn and a love song whose subject could just as easily be a lover, a mother, a child, a dog, or a dolly.  Maybe it’s one of those singing Elmo dolls since it “fills up” Boone’s “nights with song.” Brooks would later be convicted as a serial rapist, which would normally be a shocking secret for a composer of wholesome songs of true love, but the composition is so blatantly mercenary and insincere that his hypocrisy is almost expected. His primary career was writing ad jingles for heck’s sake, and this one conveys all the deep, soulful affection of a Pepsi commercial. Actually, the “you” the song is addressed to could be a product as well as anything else. “Oh, General Electric, you light up my life! Oh, RCA Victor, you fill my nights with song!” And his production is no better, overwhelming Boone’s voice with an almost-parodic backdrop of weeping violins. It’s not for lack of trying on Boone’s part, though. She hollers and coos her way through the song, stretching notes out past their breaking point. The emotion of the song is conveyed in the style of a high school play, using volume in place of depth and emphatic readings in place of heartfelt ones. In making unlistenably bland music that sold in the millions to people who were too scared to buy anything with genuine spirit, Debby proved herself to truly be her father’s daughter. If you can’t handle solid food, you stick it in the blender. And if you can’t handle solid music, Pat and Debby have your back.

1. John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John – You’re the One That I Want/Summer Nights/Hopelessly Devoted to You (and Frankie Valli’s Grease)
   

Is there any better way to cure yourself of nostalgia for the seventies than diving into its mangling of nostalgia for the fifties? The Grease soundtrack might be the best argument against industrialized nostalgia in all its forms, taking music by artists of the pasts and flattening them into soulless kitsch with all the artistic integrity of a poodle skirt Barbie doll. The grotesque caricaturing Grease puts doo wop through makes you wonder if the creators of these songs actually liked works of the artists they’re ripping off in moments like the nasally Valley Girl “tell me more, tell me more” chorus of “Summer Nights” from the girls, and the boys who sound like Muppet New Yawkers. And coming at it from a distance of twice as long as the distance between Grease and its subject, it becomes apparent just how much it combines the worst of both eras. Olivia Newton-John’s vocals are firmly entrenched in the scrubbed-clean seventies style of easy listening divas like Debby Boone and Anne Murray, and the country guitar on “Hopelessly Devoted to You” can’t disguise that it sounds far more like the easy listening ballads of the seventies than the torch songs of the fifties. “You’re the One That I Want” is the ultimate example of the fussed-over corporate pop of the era, so oppressively insistent in its happiness that it ends up conveying no emotions at all, except maybe greed. Even when they score a genuine fifties icon like Frankie Valli, the makers of Grease give him the kind of limp disco number that listeners could have found anywhere on the dial. “Conventionality belongs to yesterday” he sings, apparently unaware that the song is the absolute embodiment of unimaginative conventionality. When the lyrics aren’t dull or hypocritical, they’re a horrifying reminder of attitudes that need to be left far in the past, like when the boys on “Summer Nights” want to know “did she put up a fight?” The two stars take opposite roads to awfulness: Olivia Newton-John is a poised, professional vocalist without a whiff of personality, while John Travolta tries to cover his lack of singing ability with a truly noxious personality. When he squeals “I’ve got chiiiiiiiills! They’re multiplyyyyyyyy-enm!” you’ll get chills too, and not the good kind. And the way he mangles the word “nights” into a multiple-syllabled, sinus-shattering monster is the kind of thing that would make you worry about the health of a dying pig.