Ghosts of the past
November 22nd 2008 07:32
I started watching the classic Australian music show Countdown when I was about five or six. This happened to coincide with what was a period of nebulously sexual performances from the likes of Kate Bush, The Knack (yes - My Sharona is cheesy and overdone, and shamefully commercial, but there's nevertheless something a little dangerous about the way Doug Fieger looks at you through all the white glare of that clip - especially at six years of age) and Adam Ant. I found these artists almost repellently fascinating - though I didn't understand the meaning of their primal pull until much, much later. At that age they filled me with an unknown fear.
The feeling was never more intense than the time I watched in lascivious horror as a snaggle-toothed, snake-hipped man with a headband and tight red leather pants hauled himself across the stage, sweating with desire, screaming in a tribal falsetto as other men with chests as bristling as their huge mullets throbbed away on low slung guitars. It was only about a decade later that I identified this fearsome display of male sexuality. It was the 'hard' rock band Loverboy - the subsequent inspiration for the AOR revival, most accurately homaged in Mark Wahlberg's performance in Boogie Nights.
Interestingly, Heart's Magic Man, with its pulsating beat and Ann Wilson's moaning delivery, had a similar aural effect on me at a young age. The song was brilliantly put to use in the seduction scene of the film Swingers many years later.
So when I finally figured out that the guy who sings the interestingly anodyne 80s-big-haired-wedding-ballad duet 'Almost Paradise' (from the Footloose soundtrack) with Ann is none other than that slinky ugly-sexy man from Loverboy, Mike Reno, it all. made. sense. They'd both bumped and ground all that sexual frustration out in their earlier work and were no longer scary.
Interestingly, Heart's Magic Man, with its pulsating beat and Ann Wilson's moaning delivery, had a similar aural effect on me at a young age. The song was brilliantly put to use in the seduction scene of the film Swingers many years later.
So when I finally figured out that the guy who sings the interestingly anodyne 80s-big-haired-wedding-ballad duet 'Almost Paradise' (from the Footloose soundtrack) with Ann is none other than that slinky ugly-sexy man from Loverboy, Mike Reno, it all. made. sense. They'd both bumped and ground all that sexual frustration out in their earlier work and were no longer scary.
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