The Real Heat

As I noted in The Spins, the second post for this week was also going to be birthday related. Out of curiosity one day, I went and looked up the Billboard 200 for the week of my birth. For Billboard, this is the week of July 21st.

At the top of the heap is Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA. There’s nothing I need to say about this album both because I’ve written too much about Bruce Springsteen in recent weeks and because you already know everything you need to know about this album from existing in the world. In the second spot is Huey Lewis and The News’s Sports. Again, great album, nothing for me to add here.

The rest of the top ten for this week was, from three to 10, Prince’s Purple Rain soundtrack, The Cars’ Heartbeat City, Lionel Ritchie’s Can’t Slow Down, Billy Idol’s Rebel Yell, the Footloose soundtrack, the Breakin’ soundtrack, Van Halen’s 1984, and ZZ Top’s Eliminator. Even if they aren’t all my favorite albums, they all have something worth recommending on them.

After seeing this and scrolling a little more, I got curious as to what these albums on this chart sounded like, so I went about developing the idea for this post. I opened up a random number generator and set it to generate numbers between 1 and 100 (I thought this was a wide enough range for this project). I took the first five numbers—40, 85, 35, 51, and 88—and listened to the corresponding albums.

The albums I listened to were Teddy Pendergrass’s Love Language (40), One Way’s Lady (85), Joe Jackson’s Body and Soul (35), Peabo Bryson’s Straight From The Heart (51), and Icicle Works’s self-titled album (88). With the albums selected, the hard work of actually listening to the albums began. While I was familiar with all of the artists save Icicle Works, I did not know these particular albums.

To start with the Teddy Pendergrass album, it ran for 35 minutes. You know what you can do in 35 minutes? Make a baby. This is a very sexy album, an album for those times when you need to have the music reinforce what’s about to happen. The first couple of tracks are for foreplay, then you get a few more for the action, and then there’s even a couple of comedown tracks because you like to cuddle afterwards. Pendergrass has an excellent voice, so I can never say that it was unpleasant to listen to. Was it particularly memorable? No, I feel like it was really mid-tier work, but given his level of professionalism, it was still a good listen. The standout on this album is the duet between Pendergrass and a young Whitney Houston, “Hold Me.” They fit well together, and Houston’s talent was obvious from the first note she sings.

Next up was One Way’s Lady. Given that this is the band that wrote “Cutie Pie,” a straight banger, I had high expectations for this one. They were actually met. The tracks varied in tempo, but the overwhelming feeling was groovy. Their disco roots showed, and they made the album an engaging listen from beginning to end. The first track, “Lady You Are,” is just excellent. I do have beef with the track “Smile” on this album, where the singer is trying to coerce a woman into smiling for him. Don’t love that, but it was the 1980s and people still thought that was an acceptable thing to do, which it isn’t.

Joe Jackson’s Body and Soul is an album that exists in the world. While I was listening to it, I was trying to ascertain what propelled this album to its spot on the chart. I could only come up with one answer: it is perfect for doing cocaine to. It is uptempo. The lyrical ideas are decent if not wowing. It is extremely well produced. On its surface, it has all of the markings of a good album. That said, I felt nothing while listening to this album. It felt like nicely made background music, which is how I ended up thinking about cocaine. At the end of the day, it is really hard to be a good record for doing drugs to, so this is actually a solid accomplishment. Joe Jackson can hang his hat on this, even if it may not be exactly what he was aiming for.

Peabo Bryson does more of what he is good at on Straight From The Heart. His singing is impeccable. The songwriting is pretty standard R&B fare, but because of the range and quality of his voice, it carries some weight. I listened to this album no more than three hours before starting this dispatch, and I would be hard pressed to tell you anything that was truly dynamic about it. Like I said, his voice is amazing. He can sing a ballad like nobody’s business. The whole project though was just lacking that hook it needed to really stick with me.

The last album I listened to was the debut album from Icicle Works, a post-punk quartet from Liverpool, England, signed to the eternally hip indie label Beggars Banquet. When I found out what they were, I became intrigued. I wondered how it made it to the charts. I got my answer very quickly: it fits neatly into the sonic palette popularized by contemporary bands such as Echo and the Bunnymen, the Psychedelic Furs, and The Style Council, all of which are on the American charts by this point in time. This is not a bad thing. The guitars chime beautifully, and the music has a beautiful psychedelic quality to it. Even though it does have the generic English sound traveling through the US at the time, the music itself does stand on its own. The track that is best known from the album, “Love Is A Wonderful Color,” is a superb track that has been slightly lost to time, which is unfortunate.

Of the five albums I listened to for this, I would return to Lady and Icicle Works. I thought they were the best of what I listened to. Even if everything wasn’t a banger, this project did give me a good idea of what the American popular music scene was around my birth, and I did appreciate that. The answer was that it was really interesting. If you were to follow this link and look at it yourself, you’ll see acts such as R.E.M., Sheila E., Madonna, and Billy Joel as well as Herbie Hancock’s Future Shock. I assure you that it is far more interesting than our current charts, and that’s not just because Morgan Wallen has three albums in the top ten.

I will leave you with one more thing before I fully sign out. Teddy Pendergrass has a song called “Happy Kwanzaa.” It is one of the best Kwanzaa songs ever. Does it feel like a complete throwaway of a track? Sure, but it still slaps. When you and yours huddle around your kinara and celebrate the seven principles of Kwanzaa at the end of the year, just put this on the background and know that everything is OK.

As always, take care of each other and let other people know about this. I’ll be back with a shortened week next week. There will only be Spins, no long post. I’m going to visit family and will not have time to write two posts. Enjoy your weekend.