3/19

david legault
on
billy ocean, “loverboy”

(march badness)

For 2025’s March Second Chanceness, each day in march we are bringing back an essay that previously lost in the first round of previous March Xness tournaments for your consideration.

March Xness is a fun tournament, but also at times a cruel one! Each year 32 essays and essayists lose in the first round (and 63 of 64 will bow out before a winner is crowned). Because of the pace of the first round, many of our readers probably don’t get a chance to closely read all of the essays each year! So for 2025 we wanted to dig some of these out of the archive and give them another read, this time on their own, no competitor. Just a moment of attention and even of glory. The Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee picked these based on reader nominations as particularly worthy of getting a second look. There are many brilliant essays that lose each year. Which are your favorites? This year we’re not voting: we’re only reading and celebrating and remembering. The tournament proper will come back in 2026 with March Sadness (lottery entry link in the menu above). We hope these great essays will again earn your love. Signed, the Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee

Last week, in a workshop, another writer told me they believed all of my writing was in some way about failure. This felt like something of a backhanded statement at first, but it makes sense: if the essay is about the attempt, the “trying,” then that doesn’t necessarily mean that everything results in success.

That isn’t to say that this essay isn’t successful. Rather, it was interesting to see how much failure (in this case, my inability to interview Billy Ocean) is a driving force for the sort of writing I’ve been interested in but haven’t necessarily had the language to articulate until quite recently. I think this is why the March Xness project is such a fit for the essay: most of the essays are going to be losers in some game-focused sense, but that’s ultimately irrelevant. I’m more interested in those who take up the lost causes, or the surprising upset that comes from a kickass essay superimposed over a shitty song. What I’m trying to say is that I’m more interested in the trying.

Billy doesn’t have to try. This song rips, will continue to rip. I’ll be spinning my copy of Suddenly all day. I hope you’ll join me. —David LeGault

david legault on “loverboy”

Billy Ocean won’t talk to me. I don’t know if it’s entirely his fault; my attempts at contact have been through a descending ladder of legitimacy: emails and phone calls to his talent agency, followed by letters to his record label, followed by a few unanswered DMs to a selection of the 89 people Billy follows on Twitter, followed by, I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit, a few choice comments on his Youtube channel videos. I love Billy (before even starting this project I was somewhat alarmed to see how high he was ranked in my Spotify stats) but never before have I felt such urgency that we actually speak. Perhaps it’s the occasion of the badness tournament, or my own feelings of isolation in recent months, but it matters to me that he matters to me and I don’t matter to him at all. The song “Loverboy” points to a sort of jealousy, a desire to have the unnamed lover to himself. I too am jealous for his attention, for the sort of answers only he could provide.
Truly, before this goes any further, you gotta watch this video. I know, yeah, if you’re here you’re probably already watching, or you might have listened to the song in the tournament playlist, but listen: nothing is going to prepare you for what it is you’re about to, have to, watch. We’ll get to the song, but this video is an event in itself that requires a certain reverence. Maybe dim the lights, maybe shut off your phone, make an event out of it. It is rare that a Youtube video is worthy of ceremony, but here we are: watch it, then maybe watch it one more time.
You can see what’s happening here: it’s 1984 and the last year and a half brought us Return of the Jedi and the Thriller video. We are all synth and neon and big budget excess: a remixed Cantina Scene with Billy stuck in the Phantom Zone cube with General Zod.

The Phantom Zone is a prison dimension in the DC Universe: one that exists outside of time and space, where prisoners can observe, but cannot interact. It seems as good a metaphor as any for Billy’s presence in this video, for my own attempts at asking him a very simple question: Why?
Because, in a tournament of badness, this video is the song’s only failure (albeit it a glorious one). It is an unironic “Knights of Cydonia.” It is the ambition of Star Wars by way of rejected Dr. Who puppetry. It is the image of exoticism filmed on a beach in Dorset, England.

Billy Ocean won’t talk to me. Unless it is through his lyrics, his songs. “Carribean Queen” has been my karaoke secret weapon for at least a decade: the perfect karaoke ratio of recognizable and under-used, his use of heavy breathing as lyric. “Get outta my Dreams, get into my Car” is a perfect synthesizer blast (not to mention the joy of singing the “Get in the back seat Baby!” backing vocals). The writing of this essay introduced me to his later work...surprisingly good! There’s some more traditional reggae calling back to his Trinidadian roots that have been in surprisingly high rotation at my house over the past few months
“Loverboy” is not a song of love or heritage, but of lust and unfamiliarity. It is a song about strange bodies pressed together, of wild jealousy. It’s more fun than that sort of description would suggest. The song makes a sharp contrast in the connotation of the words “love” and “lover.” The music? Synth bass lines all the way down. Orchestra hits that sound more appropriate on the NBA Jam menu screen. Synthesized grunts from the Goat-Man like those found on Ferris Bueller’s coughing keyboard.
But over all of it, Billy’s voice belts out—giving “Loverboy” the pathos it needs to feel fun and bright. Despite the setting of the scene, Billy’s voice still makes me believe in it.
Billy Ocean won’t talk to me, but perhaps that’s because, as the video begins, he is spiralling off in his prismatic cube, galaxies spinning around him. For the sake of badness, this video brings the badness in its purest form. Whether this is a song about relationships or just sex, any version of those events is corrupted by what’s seen here. Billy, can you tell me why the rider on horseback in the first shot is obviously a little person in a costume and mask different from the actor’s clothing mere seconds later in the video? Can you tell me why the main actor is goat-esque, why this creature without language is attracted to a girl not of his species? Did he come here for this girl—seemingly interested in her date, seemingly uninterested in the wretched Goat Man who just entered the bar--or is he here for anyone? Why is there a plastic 2-liter bottle at the bar, a child’s deflated bouncing toy put up on a pedestal? Why are we expected to cheer when the Goat Man starts killing everyone, dragging the girl against her will to the back of his waiting space horse? Why—when the camera pans away to the horse running on the English shore—is there only one rider?

Billy Ocean won’t talk to me. but I suspect it doesn’t matter all that much. In a video celebrating the song’s 30th anniversary, Billy explains the plot of this story, suggesting that he and the protagonist are fighting over the same girl. Suggesting that the video was a lot of fun, captured the spirit of the song. Billy, what are you talking about?
Earlier interviews tell me that Billy hated the video, didn’t understand the concept, that the fault was with the director and he was at the whim of a record label. But then again, the video’s producers won’t talk to me either.
It is hard to associate badness with anything but failure. I’ve come to the realization that a pretty significant bit of my own work derives from disappointment: the nonfiction attempt at doing something, but failing to achieve. Where fiction could be revised toward a more satisfying conclusion, my nonfiction projects always end short of original vision, all tension resulting from my attempts at bridging truth and expectation. Billy Ocean won’t talk to me, and I can’t help but take it personally.

Billy Ocean won’t talk to me, but if he did, this is what I’d tell him. That when I was seventeen years old I entered the Battle of the Bands at the Michigan Upper Peninsula State Fair as a solo act. That I had little musical talent to speak of, submitted a poorly recorded demo as a joke, and several weeks later found myself on stage in front of several hundred people. That I programmed some techno drum loops on my parents’ computer and burned them to a CD; that I played a Casio keyboard to the beat; that with the exception of some spoken word narrative between songs, the 15 minute set was almost entirely instrumental. I would tell Billy that to hide my lack of talent, I created an entire conceptual storyline, acted out on the stage by a few of my friends in costume. Billy, I dressed my friends as monsters to destroy a cardboard city; I dressed another in a robot suit to fight the monsters back. I swung a hammer in my left hand as I pecked away at some synthesized arpeggios with my right.
What I’m trying to say, Billy, is that I know what it is to produce low budget science fiction set to music. That you were asked to make a video you didn’t want to make, that sometimes there are consequences to the jokes we like to make. That your badness is remembered as an odd relic of a very specific slice of popular culture; that my own badness resulted in the only time I’ve ever seen-let alone experienced-a literal booing off of a stage. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t laugh it off, that it was more or less the best reaction my joke could have produced; I’d be lying if I said that everything under my laughter was screaming from the embarrassment, that even now I want to laugh at the absurdity while realizing how much the shame of this moment is still driving something in my subconscious. If I could share this with you, Billy, I like to think I would. But you remain painfully out of reach.
Billy Ocean won’t talk to me, but I like to think that maybe he can read this. Let one of these projects come with a happy ending and a more satisfying conclusion. Let any one of my many questions be answered, let me know that you know what it means to look back at a certain sort of badness, let me know how you can laugh about it now with the wisdom that’s come in the 30 years since. Let me know if you can finally tell me why.

David LeGault is the author of One Million Maniacs, a book of essays on the power of collecting. Recent work appears in Gulf Coast, North American Review, The Normal School, and Barrelhouse, among others. He lives in Cincinnati, where he’s working on a book on how board games shape our lives.