Apparently, Tim Curry had a stroke recently, and my heart goes out to the guy and I hope he makes a full recovery and that he can soon get back to being the most kitschy and flamboyant human being this side of John Waters.
I've always loved the guy. He's made a career out of making bad movies a little more awesome with his presence. His iconic performance in Rocky Horror Picture Show defined the concept of a performance that's so bad that it's good. The guy is a b-movie legend, and his performances in film, stage, TV and cartoon voice work are always fantastic and very memorable.
But one of my favorite things he's ever done is I Do The Rock, a largely forgotten song he made in 1979. I have no idea how it's been forgotten, because it's everything glorious about Tim Curry. He's making a horrible attempt at an accent - I don't even know what accent. Russian? Jamaican? I'll just call the accent 'Tim Curry Attempting an Accent.' It's the same one he did in Congo. He's also prancing around like the gayest man on the planet, and just being all around awesome. Also, the song is absolutely horrendous. It's one of the worst things I've ever heard, but I can look past that because it's Tim Curry, dammit. Hell, I don't look past it. The awfulness is the main attraction. I'm watching this flamboyant, creepy British guy prance around and sing the most idiotic lyrics I've ever heard. This is Tim Curry at his finest.
It's been a while since I've done this, and I figure the best way to make a comeback to this blog is with a throwback to my first entry - Device. I've done a bit more research about these guys and their keyboardist/songwriter Holly Knight since my first entry, because of the same kind of curiosity that lead me to discover countless bands and artists. To quote the guy Harry Callahan threatened with that famous 'did I shoot six shots or only five' line, "I gots to know."
That's how I found their other video for a song called Who Says. It's quintessential eighties trash rock, and it is glorious.
This video might be obscure as hell, but it's a defining one of the era. It had everything.
It was shot in a warehouse. There are random spotlights all over. For some reason, there's some hot girl wearing a sweatshirt wandering through a parking garage. Every guy here has a magnificently awful blonde mullet. Holly Knight is playing a keytar. A friggin' keytar, for God's sake. And the fashion is horrendous.
The guitarist is wearing denim with a scarf around his neck. The lead singer is wearing leather chaps over his denim - LEATHER CHAPS. Holly Knight is wearing a tight one piece spandex thing with a jacket that doesn't look like it has any way of closing, and it doesn't even go any lower than her stomach. The drummer is wearing a sleeveless black button up shirt. The kicker there? Holly Knight was credited for providing 'programming,' which I assume means drum machine programming. There was no drummer credited on the album. They just found a guy with a mullet and sat him down at the skins for this video because... I have no idea why.
The best part of this? The singer. Initially, I thought his voice sounded familiar. I brushed this off because it's sort of the generic eighties singer voice. Then I looked up the album's credits on the All Music Guide and found out that the singer is Paul Engemann. It's certainly not a household name, but he does have one very well known song.
Holy shit, it's the Push it to the Limit guy. I'm kicking myself for not finding this out for the first entry on this blog.
This is a great one of the best pieces of eighties rock I've come across. It's cheesy and stupid, sure, but it was written by Holly Knight and sung by the same voice that did Push it to the Limit. The album was produced by Mike Chapman, who was pretty much the Holly Knight of the seventies. You shouldn't expect smart music from these people. You'll get catchy, listenable and very memorable music from them, though.
Unfortunately, Device split up after one album, and this and Hanging on a Heart Attack are the only videos they put out. It's a shame because these videos are great fodder for me and this blog. But I can take solace in the fact that Holly Knight was a very prolific songwriter. There will be more songs with her songwriting credits on here, you can count on that. It would be unavoidable even if I was trying not to - she's that prolific. But I won't avoid her work. Not just because it's perfect for this blog, but because I really like her work. I'm a fan.
This is an update to my last entry from a few weeks ago about Eurovision where I railed against the contest for producing a lot of shitty music. I still stand by that statement. But to be fair, I didn't pay any more attention to Eurovision after writing that and I just now figured that I might as well see who won.
Eurovision has declared a winner. Only Teardrops by Emmilie De Forest, Denmark's entry. I'm not blown away by it, but it's a pretty decent song.
So yeah, something decent won this year. It's better than that Norwegian guy's awful Fairytale song that won a few years back. That song was the worst piece of music to ever come out of Scandanavia. And that's the region of the world that crapped out ABBA. I'd take Dancing Queen over that garbage any day of the week.
I like how this went from sort of praising Eurovision for this year's winner being decent, into ripping into some fiddle playing jerk's awful song. But seriously, Fairytale can go fuck itself.
Eurovision is this month! What is Eurovision, you may ask? Let me explain this to my American readership.
It's a yearly contest where a bunch of European countries (and a few in northern Africa and the western parts of the middle east, which as any fourth grader taking a geography class could tell you, are not parts of Europe) pick singers from their country to record a song, and then a panel of judges picks which one is the best. It's a pretty huge deal in that corner of the world.
Some of the artists who took part in the contest have gone on to be big names in the music world. Such as ABBA and Celine Dion, who most of know for being completely and indefensibly horrible.
However, in the interest of fairness, I want to talk about one of the good entries in the contest, because there were some good ones over the years. By the law of averages, there would have to be. If Sturgeon's Law states that 90% of everything is crap, 10% has to be at the very least not crap, and a small percentage of that 10% has to be good or even great, right?
The best song I could find from the contest is by music legend, Julio Iglesias with his first big hit song, Gwendolyne, which was Spain's entry in the 1970 contest. It's an absolutely beautiful song.
On the other end of the quality spectrum is this mess, the UK's 2000 entry, Don't Play That Song Again by Nicki French.
UGH. Don't play that song again.
This woman has all the talent of a third place runner up on a bad season of American Idol. She's probably better known for this awful cover of Total Eclipse of the Heart that was an actual hit in America in 1995 going to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100. I have no idea why. It's painfully bland.
It's not always pop music, though. Sometimes, it's as far from pop as you can get. And it still manages to suck. Like Spain's 2010 entry, Algo Pequenito by Daniel Diges.
It's like Tim Burton and Cirque Du Soleil teamed up to show me absolute horror, and to add insult to injury, they had some guy with Art Garfunkel's hair sing a horrible song at the same time.
Norway's 1978 entry, Mi Etter Mil by Jahn Teigen, is considered one of the worst ever, apparently. The kicker is that they brought this guy back twice afterwards to represent Norway.
I don't know why people hated this. If you're going to make awful music, you might as well be hilariously bad about it. I dig this guy. The suspenders, the tie, the collar, the pants, the sunglasses, that little jump he does at the end... This is a man failing spectacularly, and apparently he used that failure to propel himself into a successful music career. Jahn Teigen rules.
Here's another one from Norway, 2009's entry by Aleksander Rybak. The song is called Fairytale. This guy has one of the worst singing voices I've ever heard. And he rocks the fiddle like a Scandinavian Charlie Daniels.
Here's the worst part. That won. A panel of judges from across Europe determined that this was the best song to come out of Europe and a handful of countries outside of Europe that year. Now, I'm not really up on European popular music from 2009, but I'm betting that that's not true.
As I mentioned before, not all entries are from Europe. The funny thing is that Israel has won the contest three times. That's not a statement of quality, but it's something.
Anyway, here's Israel's 2000 entry. It's by a band called Ping Pong, and the song is entitled Sa' me 'akh. Just press play and brace yourself, because you're in for a bumpy ride.
You probably turned the video off as soon as the singing starts, and that's understandable because blondie there is one of the worst singers I've ever heard, but trust me - it gets worse with each passing second. This is one of the worst things I've ever heard. I hate this song and I hate everyone involved with it.
Apparently, they got into a bit of trouble with their country's government when they all pulled out flags, some of them Syrian, and waved them around because a song this horrible needs a political message thrown in because otherwise, I wouldn't take it seriously.
That's not all the horrible songs I could find (and the Julio Iglesias song isn't the only good one I could find either), but that's all I really want to say. I think I showcased plenty of horrible stuff and one really good song, and that's really the only thing I'm trying to do here.
I honestly wish I had more time to research this contest because I'm sure I'm missing some great music, as well as some horrendous garbage. I just hope that Ping Pong was the worst entry in Eurovision's history. I don't know if I could stomach anything that's worse than that.
There's also the possibility that I'm being far too kind to Eurovision. I won't rule that out either.
