the first round
(6) lionel richie, “say you, say me”
defeated
(11) tom jones, “she’s a lady”
114-109
and will play on in the second round

Read the essays, listen to the songs, tweet at us, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 4.

Mandy Len Catron on “Say You, Say Me”

Let’s dispense with small talk here and get right to the point: as far as bad song tournament entries go, Lionel Richie’s “Say You, Say Me” is a bit of a softball. It’s just so bad. In so many immediately obvious ways. In fact, the song’s badness is so self-apparent that I considered just dropping a link to the video here and moving on with my day.
But maybe you, like me, began this essay with only a vague fondness for Richie’s velvet voice and a whisper of the song’s chorus echoing from deep in the recesses of memory. And it’s for you—for both of us, really—that I feel obliged to forge ahead.
Unlike many of the songs in this tournament, SYSM hasn’t aged badly. It was always bad. Let’s take Criterion 1 from the March Badness selection committee: Lyrical Weakness or Emptiness.
You would be forgiven for not remembering whether SYSM has any words other than the three in the song’s title. But it does. It has quite a few of them. Take, if you will, the first verse:

I had a dream, I had an awesome dream
People in the park playing games in the dark
And what they played was a masquerade
from behind the walls of doubt a voice was crying out

It’s as if, thirty-five years ago, Richie had the presence of mind to write a song for this very tournament. Should we unpack this verse? Honestly, it’s impossible to explicate the lyrics’ badness without simply repeating them, with emphasis. Our speaker (Richie?) had a dream—but not an everyday dream, an “awesome” dream. And this “awesome dream” was about, of all things, people playing games in the park? In the dark?
Was it nighttime Frisbee? Or soccer by headlamp? Because those at least sound fun, even if they don’t quite rise to the level of awesome. No, the nighttime game was was a masquerade, with, apparently, disembodied voices, which sounds very Eyes Wide Shut though that film was still fourteen years from being made at the time of SYSM’s release.
Do these lyrics count as weak? I think it’s safe to argue that, though they do seem to evoke a vague sense of existential terror, they certainly fail  to capture what appears to be the song’s central theme: friendship.
I know. I know. It’s no “Lean on Me” but the friendship thing is there. You have to wade through the nonsense of verse one before you actually get to it. Sure, the chorus sort of gestures toward some kind of dyadic relationship. There’s a “you.” (Is that us, the song’s listeners? I’ve certainly felt that way a time or two in the roughly hundreds of times I’ve listened to this song over past few weeks). And there’s a “me,” which I have consistently taken to mean Richie himself, the song’s sole writer and performer. Given enough listens, the song does begin to feel like more than a mere lesson in pronouns. Here’s verse two:

As we go down life’s lonesome highway
The hardest thing to do is find a friend or two
That helping hand, someone who understands
When you feel you lost your way
You’ve got someone there to say, “I’ll show you.”

It’s a little cheesy, but here, at least, the lyrics are intelligible. The official music video, which includes clips from the largely-forgotten movie White Nights—a film about an unexpected friendship between a Russian ballet dancer played by Mikhail Baryshnikov and an American tap dancer played by Gregory Hines—does a lot of the heavy lifting on the friendship-as-central-theme front. That director Taylor Hackford commissioned the song specifically for the film suggests that, on some level, Richie must have had friendship in mind when he was writing.
Is it possible that he grafted friendship onto a song he’d already written about postmodern Freudian angst? I won’t rule it out.
This lyrical inconsistency is matched by a truly inexplicable bridge where the pop piano ballad suddenly morphs into an electric-guitar driven dance brake that ends with the urgent feel-good directive to “believe in who you are/ you are a shining star.” I mean: really? If Richie set out to write the most incomprehensible-yet-blandly-uplifting pop-rock piano guitar dance ballad in history, he certainly hit it out of the park with this one. Or he hit it straight into the hearts of Academy voters because SYSM actually won the Oscar for Best Original Song that year.
Taken together, the song and the video seem to capitalize on the feel-good post-Civil-Rights-movement we’re-all-in-one-big-melting-pot-now racial sentimentality of the 1980s, which I think at least partly explains why it was so beloved by both Hollywood and the general public. The video also somehow invokes the possibility that, despite our differences, the universal language of dance might somehow soften the tensions of the Cold War. That all of this can happen in a four minute video that opens with Richie’s head rising above the horizon like the Arctic Sun (did I mention the movie is set in Siberia?) feels kind of masterful if I’m honest.
Here’s the thing: try as I might, I just can’t hate this song. Maybe it’s the magic of Richie’s voice that’s so hard to argue with. No matter how inscrutable the lyrics or how mawkish his sentiments, I like hearing him sing. Or maybe it’s that when the future arrived in my childhood home in 1991, it came in the form of a five disc DC changer. My family had Dancing on the Ceiling on heavy rotation. We didn’t even need another four discs because we had the nine incredible tracks on this one album. The crowd-pleasing title number “Dancing on the Ceiling” (oh what a feeling!), the treacly “Ballerina Girl” about Richie’s daughter Nicole, and, of course “Say You, Say Me,” which Motown kept off of the White Nights soundtrack so they could release it on Richie’s own album a year later.
It didn’t matter to us that our favorite album was already half a decade old. Every day after school, I popped open the CD case, delivered the glimmering disc into its slot, and my sister and I danced our hearts out around the living room. We’re gonna have a party and it’s starting as soon as the school bus reaches our driveway.
I’ve spent a lot of time this past month trying to understand why it is that I like something so self-evidently terrible so very much. Not just at age ten but even now, as an adult with what I hope are more developed musical sensibilities. I take some comfort in the fact that I’m not alone in my enjoyment of this song. Not by a long shot. If you watch the official live video you can see for yourself. Admittedly it is a self-selecting group, but Richie is playing to literally thousands of people who genuinely love this song. Arms are aloft and waving, lips are mouthing the words, lovers are nuzzling. There is meaningful finger pointing—to “you” and then to “me”, naturally—and there are countless soulful nods. People are feeling it. And Richie delivers a knowing performance. He’s not here to go through the motions. He’s here to move us.

I’m not about to argue that this song is so bad it is in fact good. “Say You, Say Me” is a bad song. There’s no way around it. But if, you, like me, are wondering why it is you can like a song like this despite so many reasons not to, science has actually come up with something of an answer.
Researchers stuck participants in an fMRI machine while they listened to pop/rock songs. Perhaps predictably, participants had a strong response in both the emotion and reward centers of the brain when they heard songs they were already familiar with. Crucially, whether a participant liked or disliked a song did not necessarily predict a response in these same parts of the brain. In other words, you can know a song is bad and still feel pleasure listening to it. In fact, most of us probably do exactly this all the time.
I can just picture the inside of my own brain at that crucial moment when the bridge slows down and the drums kick in and Richie points a finger to the heavens and delivers his affirmation—I am a shining star—just as the chorus rolls in again. The dopamine is flowing and I’m not even embarrassed about it.
The way things have gone these past few weeks, Lionel Richie will probably slide into the top slot of my most-listened-to artists on Spotify for 2020. But that’s okay by me. He’s a cool guy with a gorgeous voice—and some admittedly weird dreams.

Mandy Len Catron is the author of How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia and has yet to achieve her fifth-grade dream of becoming a Lionel Richie backup dancer. 

lorraine berry on “she’s a lady”

My parents arrived in America with me in tow in November of 1965. My mum was twenty; my dad twenty-four. My working-class father understood that a Mancunian lad had no future in a decaying Britain, and he clung to the idea that America would be different. My mum remembers that she cried herself to sleep every night for two years, all the way through her pregnancy with my younger brother, a pregnancy discovered in the first few weeks of their American journey when they were without health insurance.
When “This is Tom Jones,” a variety show named for its eponymous host moved across the pond in 1969 to ABC, we were watching on the black-and-white TV through which most of my early viewing is filtered. I knew all Tom’s songs and would sing along. But I had known them from toddlerhood because of their heavy rotation on my parents’ record player. When Jones sang his 1965 hit, “It’s Not Unusual,” (which featured the pre-Yardbirds/Led Zeppelin Jimmy Page) whenever I heard his enunciation of the phrase “but when I see you hanging about with anyone,” I heard my parents’ English phrases and Lancashire dialects, which I was learning were much different—and not comprehensible—to my American friends.
In a 1967 photograph that I remember my dad taking, I’m in a blue nightgown, clutching a jump rope, and singing “Delilah” into the rope’s wooden handle: Nothing like four-year olds belting out murder ballads to inspire the parental paparazzi. Delilah will be stabbed to death by her jealous lover who becomes incensed that she has not only cheated on him, she has brazenly stood in the doorway, “laughing.” Years later, I would read Margaret Atwood’s distillation of the difference between men and women. “Men are afraid women will laugh at them,” she wrote. “Women are afraid men will kill them.”
But that hard-won understanding of the world was not yet mine. In “Delilah,” it’s clear that the listener’s sympathies should be given to the singer—the murderer—rather than the victim, whose behavior has driven the man into a murderous rage that we are to understand was justified by the betrayal. The song falls within a genre—the murder ballad—that can trace its roots back hundreds of years. The price for a woman’s betrayal in these songs was death, but it was always the man’s psychic wounds that dominated the song’s narrative.
Tom’s songs often conveyed a narrative in which it was clear that only two types of women existed in the world. There was the long-suffering lover who would put up with just about anything as a means of proving her love, or there was the evil temptress who threatened a man’s domestic tranquility and fucked up his feelings. It would take me a while to realize that one of the reasons I paid such close attention to whatever Tom was singing was because I was searching for clues about how to relate to my dad.
I remember listening to Tom’s cover of Tony Joe White’s “Little Green Apples,” which I loved for its ironic chorus, and wondering why a man would call his wife “knowing she’s busy,” and then praise the woman who “drops what she’s doing, hurries down to meet me” only to make her wait because he’s late. But she doesn’t get angry. Instead, “she sits waiting patiently, smiles when she sees me, ‘cause she’s made that way.” In my head, this sounded awful, but the lyrics assured me that this was some ultimate proof of love, because I knew from experience that it sure-as-shit snowed in Indianapolis in the wintertime.
Those lessons—and the ways that I pushed back against them—mirrored my own relationship with my idealistic, angry, immigrant father who had come to the United States after deciding that both he and my mother—children of the working class and generational poverty—would never be able to succeed in the class-stratified world of 1960s Great Britain. It took a long time for my dad to see that the same elements in Britain with their Oxbridge accents and their enormous senses of entitlement existed in different forms in the United States. We clung to the lower edges of the middle class, and we frequently fell back into a poverty that caused both of my parents shame.
There is no room for female anger in Jones’ songs, and in my house growing up, nothing would provoke my father’s insistence that I was not allowed to speak to him “that way” than my own insistence on arguing my point of view. At the moments when exchanges between my dad and me became heated, he would get in my face and shout, “Who do you think you’re talking to?” It wouldn’t be until I became sexual and discovered the men whose puffed-up responses to rejection or challenge would mimic my dad. Even now, my limbic system reacts to such provocations, and remembering just how terrified I was is painful.  The moment my anger turned me into a person who was willing to assert her point of view was the moment my dad would shut that down.
In the songs sung by Jones, men are allowed to get angry, and even better, the right kind of woman is one who can “take it” when a man is raging. But in none of those songs does one hear about what to do when a woman gets angry.
If I had been listening to country music, I might have heard more about female anger, but there was very little of it in the pop world. And if there was very little space for white women’s anger, there was even less room in the world for the anger of women of color. Cher was angry, but it was hard to take her anger seriously when combined with her over-the-top, Bob-Mackie-designed fashion sense.
My father worked away from home, and I spent most of the years of my childhood only seeing him every-other-weekend, when he would fly home from wherever he was. I missed my dad with a fierce ache when he was gone. For a girl growing up with an absent father who had to compete with her mother and two brothers for his precious attention on those alternate weekends, gleaning the ways that a woman could make a man stay felt like instructions on how to get my father to stay home. I was pre-pubescent and couldn’t detect the sexual longing that underlay so many of these songs. For me, they resonated because they echoed back to me my own longing for a complete family.

*

One of Tom’s biggest hits was “She’s a Lady.” It is only now, as I am writing this, that I have found out that the song was written by the king of icky songs about women, Paul Anka. This isn’t “She’s Having My Baby,” but the cringe-inducing lyrics, enunciated by Tom as he declares “the lady is mine,” are their own sort of poisonous gender ideology wrapped in a song to which you can dance. “Well, she's all you'd ever want
She's the kind I like to flaunt and take to dinner/But she always knows her place/She's got style, she's got grace, she's a winner/She's a lady”
Its 1/4 beat and Tom’s baritone belting the words turn it into the sort of gaslighting hit that has been used on the soundtracks of even such female-empowerment films as “Bend It Like Beckham.” When I saw the film at the theatre with an entire team of fifteen-year old soccer-playing girls, the audience rocked in their seats as they watched Parminder Nagra and Keira Knightley in a variety of training exercises. By the time Tom sings that “I can leave her on her own/Knowin’ she’s okay alone and there’s no messin’” and that while he would never abuse her, “she can take what I dish out, and that’s not easy,” the battle has been lost. The women at Tom’s shows who live for that flick of his pelvis live for what Tom wants to dish out.
In a 1971 performance on the BBC’s Top of the Pops, the music and Jones’ vocals feel discombobulated, as if Jones is singing inside a seashell and viewers have his voice to their ears. And in watching that performance again, I am reminded of just how much my English father resembled the Welsh man. Like my dad, Jones was dark and handsome, although neither man was tall. My dad topped out at five foot seven inches, a height he insisted was the “average.” My dad had black curly hair, like Jones, although for years I watched him comb his hair into a modified pompadour, with “short back and sides” accented with a wave of curls that I can still remember him combing and then finishing with some deft touches of his hands to complete the styling.
In the performance, Jones is not wearing the tuxedo that had been customary on his show. Instead, he’s wearing a silver Lamé shirt with a floppy collar and a deep-V that frames chain and pendants nestled in a rug of black chest hair. Perhaps because of the Beeb’s standards, Jones limits the swivel of his hips, one of the ways in which he seduced women audience members into throwing their panties at him.
In an undated performance from the early 1970s , Jones descends a staircase wearing tight black pants that accented muscular legs and a significant bulge. A gigantic silver belt buckle pulls the viewer’s eye toward his crotch, and the God-boots he wore were the same shoes my father wore.  Like the silver lame, the black shirt is cut low, but a crucifix (which resembles a stiletto) hangs onto his chest, and the the red-sequined bolero jacket catches the light as he moves. Backed up by dancers wearing painful-looking silver leotards and bow ties, Tom sings to each of the dancers individually, giving them come-hither looks as he rotates his hips. He also slows the song down, perhaps as a means of teasing his audience, but it’s more likely to accommodate his breathing as he sings and dances live. Jones also goes full-swivel, a man literally trying to screw his hips into the viewer in a corkscrew pattern that is disturbingly arousing. By the time he gets to the 1:39 mark in the live performance, Jones is crouching and swiveling—with his voice taking on a low sexual growl—a version of “getting low” that must have frightened TV censors half to death.
As I crept closer to adolescence, I recognized that adult women captivated men’s attention in ways that little girls did not. But as singers such as Charlie Rich would soon articulate in songs such as “Behind Closed Doors,” I was beginning to realize that what men wanted from women in public differed in some unknown way from what happened in private. Whether it was Rich bragging that “She's always a lady, just like a lady should be/But when they turn out the lights, /She's still a baby to me,” or many in Tom’s oeuvre, I was too young to realize that the men singing affirmed a world view in which it was okay for them to sing about their fears that women would embarrass them in public and would cheat on them in private unless they were under constant surveillance.
And yet, despite my intellectual understanding of just how poisonous so many of these songs were, six years after my father’s death, if I listen to Tom singing, I cannot help but see my father. If music was playing in the afternoon, both Mum and Dad would sing along, often in the kitchen where my father was teaching himself to cook and my mum followed, cleaning up after him. But if the music was on at night, I would poke my head into the living room to see my father, illuminated only by the bright red end of his lit cigarette, a drink beside him. He would sing on those nights, too, but not in a way intended for an audience. And I would become aware that while Tom Jones might be daylight music, for my dad, the songs he listened to alone in the dark were sung by Sam Cooke and Brook Benton. It would be years before I understood that Tom hadn’t held the key to my dad’s heart. Instead, his nights in the dark were spent listening to the rebel’s pain that he heard in black men’s songs of the blues and defeat at the hand of the man.

Lorraine Berry is currently living in exile in Florida in a town which features five gun stores but not a single bookstore. When she’s not writing about books, feminism, or social class for a number of publications, Berry spends far too much time constructing playlists on Spotify that match her current mood and which she hopes will hasten the revolution. She’s on Twitter @BerryFLW.