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When You’re Gone Bryan Adams featuring Melanie C

Bryan Adams and Melanie C have never met each other. There I said it, what everyone was thinking. This duet was recorded in different studios on different continents, and this video doesn’t feature one shot of the 2 supposed lovers together. 

Once, when Bryan Adams made a song, everyone bought it. His songs went up the charts and we heard them on repeat ad infinitum (excuse my Latin; I’m cerebral). Bogans loved hits like Summer of 69, even though none of us were actually born yet that summer, and Please Forgive Me because, let’s face it, what Australian man ever says that? However by 1999 the charts had morphed from adult contemporary rock and into the precursor of the slut pop we see today. I’m not slut shaming the sluts who slutted their way up the charts, because I’m sex positive. I’m just saying that Bryan Adams was not in a position to wear a G-string and a union jack bustier to ensure his ongoing success. He needed a different gimmick, like Mel C. 

Melanie C is by far the most musically talented of the Spice Girls. At one point it looked like she was the only one who’d have a career after the bands acrimonious split. In that sense she is wasted here as a backing vocalist contracted to sell a Bryan Adams song to teenage girls. BWYG was lifted from Adams non-Platinum selling album with no other hits on it On A Day Like Today. The song wasn’t rerecorded and C was not assigned her own parts. Instead she sang the same vocal that was mixed under that of Adams. C is a competent vocalist but her inclusion on the track exists only to service her appearance in this video, which saw the song ‘rocket’ to number 4 in the Australian charts. 

Upon its release Melbourne gothic rock musician Miles Brown commented that BWYG revealed that ‘Adams is really good at what he does’ by pairing him with a less competent performer. And while there might be a degree of truth in Brown’s review this song wouldn’t exist without the cute video featuring Mel C. The slapstick search premise, the green gels and Adams copious eyeliner needed a Spice Girl in order to make sense, and confected together these elements form an icon of late 20th century kitsch.   

A couple of points though, the line ‘even food don’t taste that good’ sits awkwardly with C’s documented struggles with an eating disorder during the peak of the Spice Girls fame. We also see her boiling eggs but not eating them, which is a classic anorexic trick: Let’s make some food, or bring some food over, and not eat it. I’m triggered. 

Also it has to be said that it’s weird they don’t appear together in one shot. It was either a logistical decision or an aesthetic one based on the age discordant nature of the coupling, because imagining Mel C get with Bryan Adams has to make everyone uncomfortable. In any case BWYG was Adams last chart hit. C however would go on to release the even more iconic duet Never Be The Same Again featuring Lisa Left Eye Lopes, an ode to being drawn from the closet that is more relevant than ever thanks to the diabolical gay marriage debate that’s currently gripping our country. Stay tuned for my post on that astute tome.

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Mouth Merril Bainbridge

If you’re like me all this talk about Meryl Streep will have you thinking about Merril Bainbridge, the popular Australian songstress who had a record in the 90s. The spare arrangement and the obvious combination of a melodica and pianola was always going to be a hit for Bainbridge. This song came out in 1995, before the folk explosion at the turn of the century and at a time when grunge was tapering off.

 What I love about it is that you can tell it was done in a farm country. Who needs a proper studio? Fuck it we don’t even need a producer let’s just get a 4 track from Brashs and record it ourselves. And what was the result? Well it’s a sound that sounds kind of, um, well cheap. Luckily for Merril no one had Internet at the time and Australians were starving for content so Mouth took off. 

Of course the record company was hungry to market the track to other territories. Consequently a black model was cast to play the part of ‘drum machine,’ in order to trick people into thinking that this crap might be taking place in America! Channel 9 studios in Richmond were booked for half a day to film Merril acting hairdresser sexy in front of some curtains in cute heart lingerie. But wait lets fuck with that footage in post for a bit because it looks kind of shit!  

As bad as it is though Mouth does retain some novelty value on the basis that it reminds us that getting a record out in Australia was once as easy as being a woman with blond hair. The funny thing is I recall when this was released thinking ‘this song is shit, in the same way that Perfect by Fairground Attraction is shit.’ 

The cheap production couldn’t compete with the ultra polished RnB that was coming out of the US back then. I have This Is How We Do It by Montell Jordan and Right Here by SWV in mind, they’re just 2 examples. But wait, that wasn’t a problem because barely anyone played that stuff on Australian radio. It was too dangerous too ethnic for our anglo paradise. No let’s just play blond women who went to Balwyn High because quality. This post was so bitchy I’ve got problems.  

Mouth spent 6 weeks at number 1 on the Aria charts in 1995. It is the longest running number 1 hit held by a female Australian artist in the 90s. Source: Wikipedia. 

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Dan Humphrey is Gossip Girl

If you made it to the end of Gossip Girl you might recall thinking whaaaat the fuuuck when you discovered that Dan Humphrey is Gossip Girl. I’d long since stopped watching but since the revelation was gossip worthy I gathered the fact by osmosis from a trending online publication.

It won’t shock anyone that Gossip Girl wasn’t authentic when it came to real life representation. I doubt someone ‘poor’ like Rufus could afford to rent the Brooklyn apartment that the Humphreys lived in, and just exactly how the kids got from BK to the Upper East Side was never covered. Dan never took the subway and the hour it would have taken to get to school was never depicted so how was he doing it? Teleportation?

Fudged timeframes were a running theme in GG. Rufus and Lily apparently had a relationship in the 90s then lost contact, married other people and had kids. The show started in 2007 when the kids were apparently 16 and that means Lily would have been pregnant to daddy Van Der Woodsen sometime in 1991. There are numerous references that suggest Lily and Rufus dalliance went beyond 1990 that totally debunk this timeline. Despite these jarring continuity errors no one watching Gossip Girl thought it was cinema verite. That includes Penn Badgely.

It was clearly a challenge for the actor to discover that every time that Gossip Girl published a blast at Dan, that was actually Dan writing about Dan and then reacting to it as if he didn’t know he (Dan) had written it. It’s quite evident here that Badgely shares the view that the storyline is bullshit. It’s unfortunate because any time I decide to revisit the show and catch up on episodes I missed, the fact that this ‘revelation’ awaits me at the end kind of ruins it for me. One time I exchanged lingering eye contact with Badgely at café Mogador and it destroys me a little that that sexy boy actually thinks with the voice of Veronica Mars. Use the clip below to imagine it: 

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I’ve Got 3 Pockets On My Overalls

Nowhere was the Christian Television Association’s advertising campaign more prevalent than in Tasmania. My Island home was a hotbed of televisual indoctrination all in the name of The Lord.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Of the many ads on high rotation when I was a child, I’ve Got 3 Pockets On My Overalls was the most infuriating. I couldn’t fathom what it was about, even as it played incessantly in my head. I always assumed that she was saying ‘beep’ because the pocket existed on a part of her body that she couldn’t describe because it was too profane. When i got older I realised she was saying ‘bib’, which is far more innocuous and boring.

Even though the ad probably wasn’t made in Tasmania I would scrutinise those children for years trying to figure out if I knew any of them, and had picked out the cute one to be my boyfriend.

What’s most hard to ignore about this piece is that the fashions would not be out of place in 2017. Yes it’s a cliché and it’s boring but we really are on a loop. It’s also worth noting that 80s Australia was very much hung up on being a ‘multiculture’ after the embarrassing debacle that was the white Australia policy that preceded it. The reality was the country was still oppressively anglophile, so in a way the color blind casting of this ad was quite progressive for CTA. Part of me can’t help but fear the star was stolen by a missionary and smuggled back to Australia though and this makes me a bit uncomfortable. 

But let’s not dwell on that. Instead let’s enjoy this child imploring God to cure her Uncle’s alopecia with this ever so grating joy filled song.

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You Got It (The Right Stuff)

New Kids on The Block weren’t the first boy band. Before that there were the Monkeys, the Osmonds and even the Beatles were boy bandy. However NKOTB came after a long drought of boy candy, arriving on the main stage at the turn decade in 1989.

 I was 13 when the video for ‘You Got It (The Right Stuff)’ dropped. A pseudo LA noir short shot in black and white, the clip and accompanying song is a grating and inauthentic confection that’s hard to swallow today. The boys drive around Los Angeles in an old Cadillac, engage in slowpoke choreography at the local hall before playing hide and seek at a graveyard with girls who probably weren’t paid. What I considered so cool at the time, the en pointe 90s fashion and acutely styled blow waves, now looks gauche.  That could be because it’s a cheap studio shoot for a product that had yet to prove it’s earning potential.

 This is before boy band members were permitted to have a personality. The content was delivered via a limited number of channels: TV, radio or record. There was no Twitter, no 24-hour news cycle to document your antics and the talent was tightly reigned in on a leash. It’s hard to imagine One Direction ever being so big if Harry and Louis weren’t flirting with each other on twitter all the time, but in the olden days the audience just had to make do.

 As such NKOTB were an amorphous personality, 5 youths congealed into a screen on which we can project our fantasies. The Spice Girls all had clearly defined characters that offered an archetype that each of us could identity with. Vestigial personalities emerged within New Kids later but as this is an early clip Donnie is the only distinguishable one because he has a mullet, which of course signals that he is completely crazy! The sole explanation for me ever being into this banality is that there were literally zero safe outlets for a horny 13 year old gay in Glenorchy back then. 

 And speaking of gay outlets, what’s most interesting to me about this band is the sublimation of Jon’s sexuality. This was the beginning of a series of paeans NKOTB would croon to a non-specific ‘girl’. Meanwhile Jon is a flaming homo, prevented from accessing or addressing his queer fan base because of the archaic conventions that governed pop culture at the time. Jon’s on record as being so closeted he couldn’t even tell his best friend he was gay. It wasn’t until Troye Sivan broke in 2015 that we had a mainstream gay pop idol. More on him later.

NB I can’t overstate how much I object to the use of brackets in the title. 

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Oh Superman-Laurie Anderson

My friend Rachael had this song as her answering machine recording when we were teenagers in the 90s. It now seems so antiquated, that once your voicemail was recorded on tape and that you shared it with your family. That means the whole family had to agree to that recording, and all sorts of brand confusion occurred when one of your parent’s friends from the 1800s phoned up to leave a message.

What’s unique about O Superman is that it’s a piece of video art that made it to number 2 on the UK charts. In Australia it was a regular on the late night weekend playlist of Rage, a program on Australia’s public broadcaster ABC. As a consequence Laurie could deliver avant garde art into the minds of kids on the other side of the world.

From Tasmania, New York was evoked by pieces like this. It’s interesting how it, as a cultural artefact, travelled through media and came to represent an avatar of the city. The song was poignant on the island because it existed outside the noise vortex in which it was produced. Before the Internet Tasmania was an island in a vacuum, removed from the world in the blackness of the southern ocean. When you inject ‘ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha’ into the aural scape it plays against the blackness of a mind uncluttered with content detritus.

Anderson’s performance was curated in a linear sequence that might also feature Kate Bush, Pink Floyd, REM and Weird Al Yankovic . Released in 1982, the video was produced at a time when makers were starting to eschew the traditional on stage to camera music videos in favour of more creative pitches.

Years later in 2011 I went to MOMA with my twinky boyfriend and Oh Superman was being displayed on a monitor. Being born 1989 meant that he’d never seen it before, and I explained to him about how one time in the 80s the song had been in the charts. It struck me how lucky we were as rural kids to be formatted by this content. That we had been shown video art long before we knew what it was. And right then I felt grateful for the strange life I’d lived as a child.