first round
(7) Frankie Goes to Hollywood, “Relax”
TOOK OUT
(10) Bob & Doug McKenzie, “Take Off”
224-86
AND WILL PLAY IN THE SECOND ROUND
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/10/23.
bob proehl on “relax”
There’s a story that at some point after Diana Ross recorded “I’m Coming Out,” somebody told her what the song was about. Thus informed, Diana went to the song’s writers and asked why they were trying to ruin her career.
They weren’t. But they’d noticed Diana had a massive gay following, and they thought that they—two straight dudes and Diana Ross—could give the LGBTQ+ community an anthem equivalent to James Brown’s “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud.”
Which, you know, they pretty much did.
Lady Diana got her head and her heart right. She embraced the song’s importance to her fans. It didn’t hurt that the song sold huge to everyone, queer or straight.
But think about Diana Ross in that moment of unknowing. Think of all the listeners right there with her, in that same space, blissfully unaware of what it was—and who it was—they were listening to.
There’s plenty of pop music that thrives in that space. The zone of plausibly deniability where an unsavvy listener believes those boys in the Village People are “just good friends.” So what does it mean when a pop act breaks out of that space, becomes undeniably legible as queer.
“Relax” was a creeper up the charts. It didn’t hit big in the UK until Frankie Goes to Hollywood played Top of the Pops, months after its initial release. Then one day, a BBC DJ looked at the album cover for the single. He read the lyrics on the back. And he pulled the album off the turntable mid-song.
The next day, the BBC banned “Relax” from the airwaves.
The next week, “Relax” hit number one.
I think it’s important to know that Frankie Goes to Hollywood came out of the Liverpool punk scene. Thinking of them as punks—working class punks, not art school punks—makes the band make sense, makes their brief and confrontational bout of fame make sense.
Because “Relax” could have lived comfortably in that zone of unknowing and plausible deniability. For a lot of people, it did. This is 1984. My dad bought us Boy George and Culture Club’s Colour By Numbers. It was wild times.
It is clearly and undeniably a song about fucking. You would have to twist yourself into absolute knots to think it was a song about just, you know, relaxing. My dad, notably, did not buy us Welcome to the Pleasuredome.
But if you looked even an inch beyond the song itself, the song became undeniably about gay sex. And the ones who made that conclusion unavoidable were the band themselves. They took out ads in the UK music press that read “ALL THE NICE BOYS LOVE SEA MEN.” That said Frankie Goes Hollywood was going to make Duran Duran lick shit off their boots and make Public Image Limited seem like men of good will. Public Image Limited. Johnny Rotten’s post-Pistols band. Frankie Goes to Hollywood told those washed-up punkers to fuck off with the airbrushed New Wave boys while Frankie gave blowjob instructions.
And the video. Keep in mind MTV is just a baby at this point, and no one knew what worked and what didn’t in a music video. More than half of the “Karma Chameleon” video is people waiting for a steamboat in Mississippi in 1870. Why do they specify that it’s Mississippi in 1870? I have no idea. They had no idea. Best strategy was to throw a random animal into the mix, like the chimp in the library in the video for “Head Over Heels.”
Were there masterpieces? Sure, probably? Did the overwhelming bulk of videos look like someone’s college theater department got a budget and some drugs? Yes, definitely.
In this arena where nothing make sense, how do you decide what’s off limits? Early MTV had a vague “We know it when we see it” policy, and they rarely brought the ban hammer down, but the “Relax” video went too far. It’s easy now to see why: the video takes place at what is obviously a gay S&M club and—ahem—climaxes when a Roman emperor removes his toga and ejaculates on the crowd below him. It also features an adorable baby tiger, so possibly that was a mitigating factor. We, the savvy contemporary audience, see leather daddies, but come back around with me to Diana Ross in the place of unknowing. Travel with me to the suburbs circa 1984 and couldn’t those just be nice boys dressing up like Marlon Brando in The Wild One? Or like Freddie Mercury in the “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” video? Yes, our deniability grows less and less plausible. But Freddie never got banned for prancing around in his leathers. He and Queen got the axe when they dressed in housewife drag and sang “I Want to Break Free,” the same year MTV refused to “Relax.”
So what to do with a number one hit that is undeniably, unavoidably a song about gay sex—I say “undeniably” but one cannot imagine that every dude who bought a FRANKIE SAY RELAX tee-shirt knew what he was advertising.
You ask for it to be repackaged, like “Relax” was by Brian de Palma when he used the song in Body Double and shot a new video for the boys at MTV. Now singer Holly Johnson is an impish guide, giving off Joel Grey in Cabaret vibes as he leads a sweater-sporting suburbanite into a very hetero sex club. Straight couples bump and grind, and the Frankie boys Rear Window footage of Body Double through telescopes, mugging shock and titillation for the camera as they watch what passes for racy among the eighties straights. At the climactic moment, it’s unambiguously water that splashes over a lady waiting for it, a nod to a moment in Flashdance that was touted as pure sex but is in fact pure commerce.
More important, you make sure that new package is single serving. The one hit wonder is a commodity, alienated from its producer. One hit wonder bands are not artists because artists make albums and albums are for straight white dudes. Never mind that Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Welcome to the Pleasuredome produced three more hit singles in the UK. Never mind that the album takes on sex, politics, religion, that it’s weird and sprawling and danceable and whipsmart and edgy.
Frankie Goes to Hollywood and “Relax” threatened to make something visible that was considered best hidden. They pushed so far that a confrontation seemed inevitable, but in the end, it was only a few minutes on the radio—maybe more on the dance floor, maybe the extended mix, “12 inches that must be taken, always”—and then back into plausible deniability, into the moment and the space of unknowing.
Bob Proehl is the author of the novels The Nobody People and A Hundred Thousand Worlds, a big audiobook thing with dragons coming out later this year, and a super secret thing he's not allowed to talk about yet. He writes about music and film and true crime for the Disgraceland, Badlands, and History Listen podcasts. You can find him at bobproehl.com and on Twitter @bobproehl, assuming Twitter still exists.
jim kourlas on “Take Off”
In 1985, my best friend Scotty and I spoke in an exaggerated pidgin-Canuck language. A few words peppered our conversations:
Toque.
Back bacon.
Hosehead.
Hoser!
Take off!
Good Day!!
We were fifth-graders still pulling toys from our shelves and reading Mad and Starlog while the popular kids at Greensview Elementary were inexplicably dating. They called it “going with” each other, a feat reserved for only the most athletic, extroverted, and blonde. At recess, they annexed our playground equipment for flirting games, sending us like refugees to the barren soccer field, where we carved holes from the hard ground with sticks and stones, searching for what, we didn’t know. Treasure, perhaps, our receding childhoods, or the promise that our futures wouldn’t suck.
After school, we watched Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis as Bob and Doug McKenzie in Strange Brew, memorizing the dialogue until we’d adapted its language as our own. We were too young to get the jokes—beer, hockey, Canada—but not the humor. Bob and Doug were lovable losers, imbeciles, too irrelevant to be targeted by the powerful. Their idiocy protected them. They didn’t so much star in Strange Brew as provide a lens for the narrative, like Artoo and Threepio bumbling through colossal events, only this wasn’t a space opera but a loose Hamlet adaptation set in a Canadian brewery. With Max von Sydow somehow cast as the supervillain.
Strange Brew begins with a screening of a low budget sci-fi flick featuring Moranis playing Bob playing an explorer in a dystopian future and Thomas playing Doug playing the mutant terrorizing him. Sort of. The Mutants of 2051 AD is torn apart, literally, as the film rips and we’re left with just Bob and Doug on their couch, back bacon frying on the coffee table, cases of beer towering over them like a protective shell of inebriation. The POV then shifts to a movie theater where Bob and Doug are in the audience, watching their own premier, and soon they’re running from a violent mob of fans demanding refunds. It’s confusingly meta, as if Bob and Doug were only capable of eyeballing postmodernism, or filmmaking, or anything in the zeitgeist. And it perfectly sets the tone for Strange Brew, how impossible it is for ordinary hoseheads to bridge the divide between fantasy and reality.
Any kid in the eighties with their parents’ ten-pound camcorder tried to film a movie. Watch an old commercial for Kenner Star Wars toys on YouTube and you’ll see they weren’t selling plastic figures but the dream of filmmaking. The commercials are featurettes starring “ordinary” children blissfully inhabiting their own movies. Jump-cuts, quick zooms and pans. It was as impossible as it was intoxicating.
So you couldn’t blame Bob and Doug for trying. Their dystopian future is filmed in an overcast, grim Toronto in February. Everything about it is obviously Canadian—you couldn’t claim otherwise—but it’s also a Great Lakes movie. Columbus, Ohio, where Scotty and I grew up, was on the edge of the region, a cow town devoid of professional sports until the NHL decided it a worthy expansion city in 2000. It was imbecilic and overlooked, kind of like Canada to the United States, or dorks on a playground. But there was deliverance in half-ass creativity; even though your creations sucked, you still had each other. Those adventures would never end.
Like Bob and Doug, Scotty and I were brothers. Not literally, but close enough friends it seemed so. He was Doug: the older one, confident, always with an idea or plan. And me, Bob: big-nosed, sensitive, smaller. Though we were in the same grade, Scotty was a full year older than me, an aspect of our friendship I didn’t grasp the import of until we were adults. He did most things better than me. He was wicked fast in the forty-yard-dash while I had flat feet. He was a brilliant illustrator, recreating Harrison Ford from one-sheets on his dad’s leftover office paper while I struggled to reproduce Garfield. His family opened its doors to the neighborhood while ours, Greek and introverted, was buttoned up. The family arguments at his house were funny. At mine, they were frightening.
While our classmates branded us dorks, geeks, and losers, we elevated ourselves to imbeciles and morons. In short: hosers. The shift in language was slight, but enough to nudge the pejorative to hilarious. And suddenly, magically, we were okay. We’d still be kids when we grew up.
Then one August day before sixth grade, my parents drove me past Scotty’s house, where a For Sale sign was planted in the lawn. As soon as I got home, I called him up. It was true, he told me, they were moving. To Wisconsin. Madison, wherever that was.
Take off, I told him. A month later, he took off.
*
Strange Brew wouldn’t exist without the comedy album The Great White North, which wouldn’t exist without the Canadian sketch comedy show SCTV, which birthed the McKenzie Brothers. It was 1981, and the American broadcast of the show required two minutes more airtime to fill than the Canadian version, so the CBC requested the cast produce a short bit featuring content specific to Canada. Moranis thought the idea stupid because the entire show was already explicitly Canadian, so he and Thomas produced a throwaway skit featuring two stereotypical Canucks cooking back bacon and swigging beers while haphazardly discussing some rambling topic of the day. Unexpectedly, Bob and Doug McKenzie became a hit, and later that year Thomas and Moranis produced their comedy album. Side one concluded with the hit single, “Take Off,” which featured Geddy Lee, bassist and singer of the Canadian metal-prog rock band Rush.
The song follows the same formula as The Mutants of 2051 AD, the brothers taking a stab at mainstream entertainment but falling catastrophically short. A scratch and squib of audio launches the song as they boy announce it’s “the hit single section” of the album and introduce guest star Lee. The boys are star-struck, afraid they’ll scare him off, Doug telling Bob, “Be real nice to him, eh?” Lee’s comic timing is deft as he dryly delivers how he came to record with them (“Ten bucks is ten bucks”), sounding like a long-lost McKenzie cousin. In reality, Moranis and Lee were grade-school classmates, so it wasn’t a stretch for them to reunite for an hour’s recording. Lee is charming, and the joke of his presence is even funnier knowing that Rush, while accomplished musicians and hit-makers, were anything but cool.
The drum machine begins and cheesy synths provide the melody, like the backing track for an eighties corporate training video. It’s all perfectly pedestrian, a precursor to ProTools bedroom recordings but without the angst or heart, ornamented by Thomas’s trademark flute parody. It only takes a moment for the brothers to start bickering like in their skits, arguing over ownership of the song. The contention escalates until Doug tells Bob to “Take off!” Cue Lee for his ridiculous chorus:
Take off to the Great White North
Take off, it’s a beauty way to go
Take off to the Great White North
Lee’s countertenor vocals are high diva, over-serious, and overpowering. It’s a loving lampoon of his own band, which occupied a nerdier section of the classic rock yearbook. I was always more a Genesis and Yes man than Rush, though I adored the heavy synths and cool rhythm in Neil Peart’s screed against teenage conformity in “Subdivisions.” Today I have nothing but affection for Rush, holding steadfast to big rock conventions even as its brand of prog-pop-metal was bullied out of the scene by dumb hair bands. Following the second chorus is a drum solo that winks at Lee’s bandmate Peart, providing another opportunity for Doug to take credit and demean his brother. Doug’s flute parody is taken to majestic levels, “like it was sung by angels,” he says.
There’s a moment at the end of the song I’m drawn to now, when Doug tells Bob the song is over, and Geddy bids adieu with a “Good day,” leaving the brothers to beg for him to stay:
Wait! No!
Hey! Don't go!
No! Come back, eh?
Aww. Look what you did! Everybody's gone because of you!
Come back!
The music fades, the brothers bickering over which one scared Lee off. It’s like my own interior monologue, even today, decades since adolescence, still excoriating myself for saying the wrong thing. I gauge a room and perform a version of myself to meet the vibe, praying once I’ve escaped offstage that I didn’t scare everyone off. I take off before anyone else can.
Now everybody’s gone.
*
This past December, I returned to Columbus for the holidays. I’m almost fifty now. My parents are alive and well in my childhood home, though it was renovated twenty years ago, erasing the adolescent ghosts that haunted it. I only managed one solitary stroll through the old neighborhood, tracing my paper route and my daily walk home from Greensview Elementary. My path took me past an apartment complex that loomed large in my adolescence, the home of Scotty’s nana, where he and his family would stay during their biannual trips back to Ohio when we were teenagers. The apartment looks exactly the same as it did nearly forty years ago, though I imagine the kitchen has been updated from its palette of deep browns and the cinder block walls in the basement have been painted, covering the illustrations of E.T. and Indiana Jones that Scotty had painted on his trips to spruce up the grim space.
There in that basement, on couches and spare mattresses, Scotty and his three siblings would sleep, and there he and I would congregate to laugh and reminisce. As soon as Scotty moved to Wisconsin, we began sending each other letters filled with elaborate drawings and stories and memories. A thick envelope in the mail was a balm for the misery I was enduring at school. My family didn’t take vacations, so his visits were reprieves from the awfulness of my suburb, where the wrong word invited a deluge of abuse. I could say anything I wanted around Scotty and he didn’t complain, and I would make him laugh, and I could bask in his creativity. I still never felt as talented or cool as he was. He played tailback on his high school football team; he filmed actually coherent short comedies on his VHS recorder with neighborhood kids; he went to dances and sent me pictures of his pretty dates. There was none of that for me.
In seventh grade the bottom dropped out of my social life at Hastings Middle School, and my lifelong relationship with depression began. At home my parents fought while at school my classmates trained me to avert all eye contact with them unless I wanted them to call me a fag and demean me by asking who my best friend was, knowing I had none. But I remember one day in the cafeteria when the memory of some recent letter from Scotty compelled me to answer the question: I told them my best friend was Scotty. They remembered him, his athleticism and artistic abilities maybe, and they didn’t have an answer. But the moment passed, the clouds moved back in. The bullies upped their abuse and I had no answers after that. I tried to ignore them, afraid of stoking their abuse or my parents’ rage if I were to throw a very necessary punch. It went on for years, the abuse only fading once I’d become invisible to everyone, including myself.
I wasn’t the only kid flayed by seventh-grade hell, of course, but back then I believed I was. Scotty, for instance, didn’t seem to be suffering like me. His letters were filled with all the fun things he and his family did, and so I covered up my pain for him, basking in the nostalgia of our playground years and the escape promised by all the big, dumb movies of the eighties. HBO quit airing Strange Brew before I could put it on VHS. Our pigeon language receded to memory. By high school, the drawings and jokes in our letters had given way to angsty, melodramatic text: the girls I pined for but never talked to, the girls he pined for and did. I retreated further, hiding down a weird hole of prog rock while he waxed on about how top 40 hits perfectly spoke to his love life. I discovered Salinger and Hesse while he continued to venerate the weekly offering at the multiplex, movies that increasingly left me empty. I made some tenuous friendships at school. When Scotty visited I was frustrated by how much of his time was occupied by family obligations. He was, after all, returning to Ohio to see his grandparents. But I needed more than a few days of our friendship each year. I needed to be a kid again. I needed to feel that old innocence. But Bob and Doug were distant memories.
I know now I wasn’t responsible for my middle school bullies exiling me to the lowliest lunchroom table. I suppose if I’d been more assertive, I might have gained their respect. But back then, I believed there was something wrong with me. Teachers and guidance counselors and afterschool specials always said to be yourself. But I didn’t understand what that meant, and when I attempted to be myself, I freaked people out. They took off. Even on some subconscious level, I never believed I’d scared Scotty off to Wisconsin. We were kids at the mercy of our parents who chose to move where the jobs were. His parents took off and mine stayed put. But I always carried that festering belief that someday I would say the wrong thing to him. That the more I opened up, the more risk I took on the page, in letters, or in conversations when he returned, he’d tell me enough was enough. The debt would come due.
By college, our letter-writing had become obligatory and sporadic. He was still in Wisconsin and I was just a few miles from my parents’ house at Ohio State. Our freshman year, he responded to one of my long-winded, tortured letters with the altogether fair conclusion that I was too self-absorbed. I hadn’t recognized the trouble he was having fitting in with the art crowd in college or troubles with his dad. When I wrote him back, apologizing, the I’s and my’s jumped off the page. It was impossible to write after that. I’d finally scared him off.
I’ve always treasured my friendships with women because, as the cliché goes, we talk directly about our feelings and vulnerabilities. But my male friendships are crucial, even when we talk around events straining our lives, replacing emotion with laughter, teasing one another, leaning into stupid, “meaningful” silences. We talk about sports and TV and music and books, all of it metaphor for the terror of living. We drink our beers and bicker in that odd brotherly ritual, like Bob and Doug, then say good night and dream away all the strange, ordinary turns our lives have taken.
Scotty is a successful film director and producer in Austin, where he attended graduate film school. We’re still friends, sending back and forth emails, Instagram memes, and texts. Some years ago, at his request, I mailed off all the letters he’d sent to me when we were teenagers. He asked if I would like mine in return, but I declined, afraid of what they might contain. Afraid of seeing myself as a scared, little wimp. He always had more courage than me. And so they’ve sat, moldering for forty years in their time capsule, under his care. But I finally told him I’d take them now, and when I read them I promise to greet that scared, awkward boy I was with grace and love, and no little humor, like he did for me.
Jim Kourlas earned an MFA in fiction from Roosevelt University and has stories in Longleaf Review, Lost Balloon, HAD, and Hunger Mountain, among others. He lives in Omaha with his wife and son.