round 2

(7) barry manilow, “i write the songs”
KICKED OUT
(2) KENNY LOGGINS, “FOOTLOOSE”
146-42
AND WILL PLAY IN THE SWEET 16

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 14.

Nevermind Barry Manilow: jordan wiklund on “i write the songs”

I 

I write the songs that make the whole world sing
I write the songs of love and special things
I write the songs that make the young girls cry
I write the songs, I write the songs

Nevermind that “I Write the Songs” isn't even his song—it’s Beach Boy Bruce Johnston’s, first recorded by The Captain and Tennille, then released as a single by that silly goose David Cassidy, and finally—inevitably? inscrutably?—made famous by Manilow on his triple platinum third album, Tryin’ to Get the Feeling.

Look at that cover: bathed in crimson neon, head thrown back in musical ecstasy, his leonine locks flowing around him, it’s Barry a la Bencini, the Italian artist who made the cover, Barry il piano, Italian for softly/slowly/quietly, Barry not going gentle into that good night, as you might do when trying to get the feeling, any feeling, back again. 
Nevermind that we tend to be forward-looking creatures; nevermind that we’re told not to dwell. 
And nevermind that Barry—can I call him Barry?—adopted his mother’s maiden name before his Bar Mitzvah. This is the first act of Manilowian defiance: the molting of Barry Alan Pincus. Barry the present in favor of the past.
Nevermind that this is creation, too. This is genesis, part of the origin story. 

II

My home lies deep within you
I’ve got my own place in your soul
Now when I look out through your eyes I’m young again even though I’m very old

Nevermind that Manilow has often stated his trepidation about “I Write the Songs.” “The problem with the song,” he writes in Sweet Life, his autobiography, “was that if you didn't listen carefully to the lyric, you would think that the singer was singing about himself. It could be misinterpreted as a monumental ego trip." 
Nevermind that everyone—even Barry Manilow, circa 1987 when the book was published, circa Swing Street, his thirteenth album—probably deserves their own monumental ego trip once in a while. Manilow certainly had his—in many interviews over these many years, he cites how much success made a brat of him. He would demand rooms be cleared backstage for him. When Sinatra allegedly told him, “You’re next,” he not only took this to heart but also to head and the mouth attached to it. In a 1990 interview with Rolling Stone, he describes drinks at a Philadelphia diner with Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel, telling them, “I’m going to be the biggest star at this table,” though he respected both their music more than his own. 
Nevermind that Manilow’s trepidation about his music haunts him through most interviews, and who hasn’t had the same trepidation about their work, their hobbies, their friends and homes and doddering missteps? Who hasn’t covered that trepidation in schmaltz, smoothed the edges, rounded the story a bit? 
There was a lot of rounding of stories in 1976, the bicentennial. There was a lot of schmaltz, too—fireworks and brass bands, the height of the syndicated run of The Lawrence Welk Show. Disco, maybe. Vietnam was over. The feminist movement was still moving. It was time to celebrate, pop some champagne. And a-one, and a-two...
The post-war use of schmaltz also peaked in 1976**, the year for which “I Write the Songs” was awarded Song of the Year. Manilow hasn’t won a Grammy since, but there is much to be said for schmaltz, then and now. 
In the kitchen, schmaltz is simply rendered chicken or goose fat typically used in frying or as a spread. “Schmaltz is the WD-40 of the kosher kitchen,” writes Michael Wes, author of Rhapsody in Schmaltz: Yiddish Food and Why We Can’t Stop Eating It, and “taste in schmaltz, as in Hollywood stars, varies from person to person.”
Not everyone is going to like it, has liked it, has even tried it. Still, he writes, “what you do with the schmaltz once it leaves is entirely up to you.” 
Nevermind that Manilow gets it, that he understands the dichotomy between critical and commercial success about his music. 
And nevermind that he embraces the schmaltz. Speaking to Johnny Carson shortly after his TV movie Copacabana aired in 1985, Manilow already had developed an aw-shucksian approach to interviews and to his particular brand of music. Be-ferned in the studio background, Manilow sports a short haircut far from the locks of “I Write the Songs” and an open-throated white shirt beneath a blue-ribbon colored jacket and black pants.
“Let’s talk about the television movie, it’s interesting,” Carson says in his staccato way, “I’ve read the reviews, most of them have been very good—but you said, you thought the critics, the television critics were gonna trash it—”
“Nobody’s more surprised than I am,” Manilow interjects.
“Why did you feel that way?”  
You know, I—well, they’ve sort of beat me up over the years,” he says.
The audience laughs, but only after they’d already roared their approval when Carson first announced his guest.
“OK, I’m ready!” Manilow cringes, leaning back in his chair and shielding his face from some imagined blow, some TKO that never really came for Copacabana, “come on!” 
Not every prizefighter wins every bout. Not every prizefighter needs to, either.
Blue looks good on him. He is no longer a newcomer to the scene, an accessory to Bette Midler. He no longer has to establish himself. His brand is maudlin, lonely hearts schmaltz,  though the 80s saw him explore international music, collaborations with other mostly forgettable artists, forays into jazz and swing, that “blue-eyed soul” that helped Bowie reinvent himself. He cut his hair, lost the endless razorblade collar and slacks of “I Write the Songs.” Underneath this newfound career soloing, however, the rhythm of Manilow did not, will not change. He is still Barry Manilow; he hears the critics, notes the declining sales, laughs next to Johnny Carson. 
Nevermind that he sold out Wembley, played to 40,000 people in the first open-air concert at Blenheim Palace in England. Nevermind that the Showtime special was a resounding success.
Nevermind that during this time he endowed several major universities, ensuring a musical future for untold thousands. 
This is the second act of Manilowian defiance. Change is overrated. After his debut duo of Barry Manilow and Barry Manilow II, he later released two more self-titled albums, because why the hell not? Stay in your lane, even if it means critical failure. Stay in your lane—you’re a commercial success. The Fanilows don’t love you less; they love you even more. 
You’re constant as gravity, you’re the rendered chicken fat soup to their souls, the fake rock (‘n’ roll) hiding the key to their hearts. You’re Barry Goddamn Manilow.

III (bridge)

Oh, my music makes you dance
And gets your spirit to take a chance
And I wrote some rock ‘n’ roll so you can move

Nevermind that “I Write the Songs” beat Gordon Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” and Starland Vocal Band’s “Afternoon Delight” (among others) for the Grammy and reached #1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 weekly list and eventually #13 on its year-end list.   
Nevermind that that’s hotter than 87 other vaunted songs that year. If “I Write the Songs” were a pepper, it’d rate about 2.78 million Scoville Heat Units (SHU). That’s not hot enough to blow your head off, but still—a simple heat endures. Call him Barry Habanero, the Heat that Lasts.
Sing it with me, “Copacabana”-style:

His name is Barry
He won a Grammy
For a song scorned by many as hammy
But Barry’s out there*
Creating something
Which is more than most can say at the end of the day***

IV

Music fills your heart
Well that’s a real fine place to start

Nevermind that I came to bury Manilow, not to praise him. 
Nevermind that all my early notes supported some essay about tearing down “I Write the Songs” note by note, as effectively as I could. It debuted almost a decade before I was born, and all Manilow ever meant to me was a name synonymous with mediocrity; I harbor no personal memories or connections to him or his music. I couldn’t have named three songs.
Nevermind that now at least I can name one. “I Write the Songs” is indeed a very bad song hyper-produced by professionals to hide its sugary shortcomings. Nevermind that the first fifteen seconds—tinkling piano riff buffered by a triumphant orchestral swell—tells you everything you need to know about the song, its structure, where it’s going. Though Manilow can sell it enough—he knows his way around the camera—you can’t sing I wrote some rock ‘n’ roll so you can move on the heels of a goddamned piccolo trumpet trill delivered with an avuncular finger wave and a wink to the audience. He nearly trips over the microphone cord untangling himself from the piano bench after calling upon the redemptive and transformative power of a worldwide symphony, whatever that means. Cue another finger wag.
A signifier of many of these soft contemporary classics is both A) an eager willingness to reference the song or music itself, and B) that music acts as anathema to poverty, war, drugs, loneliness or heartbreak (almost always loneliness or heartbreak), whatever ails you or doesn’t float your boat or possibly your yacht.   
“Poverty, and immigrants, and dangerous—that’s where I come from,” he told Today in 2017. More Springsteen than Sinatra, Manilow grew up poor in New Jersey. His mother was a suicidal alcoholic and his father an itinerant truck driver. 
Nevermind that he probably wasn’t thinking about that while performing “I Write the Songs.” That was past. That was Pincus. 
Nevermind that rock has always suffered from self-referential hyperbole, especially in the 70s and 80s. Telling the audience that I put the words and the melodies together / I am Music / and I write the songs is just incredibly stupid and asks the listeners to suspend their disbelief a little bit longer than the music can actually support; listen to the imperatives of “I Write the Songs” and you can draw a straight line to the redemptive (compensatory?) phallic fantasias of Joe Elliot, Dee Snider, and David Lee Roth, et al. Presented thus, “I Write the Songs” is a bad sci-fi movie led by a feather-haired pilot named Barry in a sparkly flight suit with faux safety straps glued down his wireframe torso. The 70s were a lot of things; subtle wasn’t one of them.  
So nevermind that the promise of the song cannot possibly be fulfilled by Manilow, an awkward lanky whitebread sort of guy who while ostensibly talented and naively sweet is neither the face nor certainly the fury of rock and roll, pouring forth so you can move, as the song goes; rock and roll can, and should, do more. 
Mind that the compulsion to create, however, can be undeniable, the fire in the whiskey, the coldest drink on the hottest day, every day, all the time. Mind that the curiosity and stamina to craft something tangible in a world mostly unaffected and often dismissive of the act can itself be enough reason to simply keep going, that the revolution is not the flag but the collection and binding of its fibers.  
This is the third and final act of Manilowian defiance—to commit completely to the creative process, to write vanilla ballad after vanilla ballad in the face of unadulterated criticism, to pen a dozen #1s and more than 40 top singles. To spit in the face of the spitters.
Mind that Manilow kept going. That he endured. That after Tryin’ to Get the Feeling and “Copacabana,” after declining record sales and a name synonymous with forgettable soft rock radio, Manilow didn’t, hasn’t stopped. He still sings. He still moves, a little, on morning shows and holiday specials, despite the haters, despite the Botox. He still, even now, writes the songs.****

V

It’s from me

Nevermind that we still haven’t answered the ultimate question—is this the worst song of March Badness? 

It’s for you

It certainly could be. It checks all the Muzaky boxes, nails much of the March Badness criteria.

It’s from you

But is one more lash from the public whip going to tell us anything more about Barry Manilow, or change wherever “I Write the Songs” already rates in the March Badness Hot List of your heart?

It’s for me

Let me ask you this: do you think Barry cares? 

It’s a worldwide symphony 

And if he did, do you think it’d stop him? 

*

** Manilow is gay. In 2014, he married Garry Kief, his manager for over 40 years. This takes chutzpah. Worried he’d alienate the Fanilows, he was, instead, celebrated.

***

He’s no Cohen or Reed
Berman or Mer-cur-y
But he’s been rockin’ his own way for half a cent-ur-y

****Harmony, an original musical written by Manilow, debuts next year.

Jordan Wiklund is from St. Paul, Minnesota. His essays have appeared in Pank, Brevity, Hobart, Fourth Genre, Blue Stem Review, and elsewhere. He once wrote a song called “Strawberry Jam” and it was awful. Find him on Twitter and Instagram @JordanWiklund.

BETH NGUYEN ON “FOOTLOOSE,” KENNY LOGGINS’S BEST-WORST SONG

I’ve been listening to Kenny Loggins for more than thirty years now. Not on purpose. But have you tried to get away from him? You can’t. He’s lurking in the grocery store; he’s waiting for you to get settled in the dentist’s chair. If you don’t find him, he will find you. Kenny Loggins is like someone I run into at conferences, a perpetual acquaintance. There is an accumulation. If I turn on the radio in the car and hear his voice, I keep listening. Old buddy, old friend. We are getting through this life together.
Most often, he is singing “Footloose.” This is not Kenny Loggins’s worst song. (That honor might belong to “Danger Zone.”) “Footloose” is Kenny Loggins’s best-worst song, an Oscar-nominated song, which he wrote for the screenplay that became “Footloose.” The song is deep 1984 even while it’s trying to summon an earlier decade; it’s a white guy shouting let’s rock n roll. It’s a song that sounds loud even when the volume is low, that makes you feel pretty good and pretty ridiculous at the same time. And like so many of my favorite bad songs, it begins with a story: 

Been working so hard / I’m punching my card
Eight hours, for what? / Oh tell me what I got.

Then we turn:

I’ve got this feeling / That time’s just holding me down.
I’ll hit the ceiling / Or else I’ll tear up this town

I knew the “Footloose” song by heart years before I ever saw the movie, but I cannot separate them. I hear Kenny Loggins but I picture Kevin Bacon going wild in an abandoned warehouse. Kevin Bacon on the movie poster, dancing alone, eyes closed, mouth opening, his body turned away because he doesn’t even need us, because the music from his Walkman is taking him where he needs to go. He’s an old-looking high schooler named Ren, a Chicago kid who finds himself in a rural Utah town where dancing seems so sinful that it must be banned.
The Midwestern town I grew up in wasn’t anywhere near as bad as that but it was conservative and Christian enough for me to feel quick tenderness for Kevin Bacon, for Ren. I liked the way he took on the bullies, the way he taught a new friend how to dance. I liked his little Volkswagen Beetle and his skinny, reckless, disciplined body.

You’re playing so cool, obeying every rule
Deep way down in your heart, you’re burning, yearning for some—
Somebody to tell you
That life ain’t passing you by

The “Footloose” song plays the opening and the closing of the movie, the former an extended close-up of various dancing feet, the latter an extended scene in a gussied-up barn where a bunch of high school kids who have been forbidden from dancing suddenly know how to dance. It is embarrassing and hilarious and exhilarating to watch this scene, just as it is to listen to the “Footloose” song in the company of anyone else. Here are some of the whitest people ever trying to breakdance. The guys are in tuxedos—there’s a lot of pale blue, some ruffles, even plaid. Ren stands out in a maroon jacket. The girls are in ethereal fabrics and pastels. Everyone dances in a shower of glitter. At the end, we get the perspective of the balloons on the floor: we are the balloons and Kevin Bacon dances toward us. Everybody cut, everybody cut, sings Kenny Loggins. It’s a demand but also a statement: everybody. cut. footloose.
It’s been 36 years since “Footloose” entered the American consciousness. Kenny Loggins is 72 now, a purveyor of yacht rock. Kevin Bacon is 61 and pretty much everywhere. Ren would be about 54 years old. I think I’ve seen him. He’s out there running at dawn. He’s got all this gear in his garage. He looks good for his age in the way that men sometimes get to, easily. He hides his life crises with salads and biking and craft beers. He’s never really quit cigarettes. It is possible he’s an asshole, the kind of guy who talks about working hard and playing hard. Or maybe he is a secret, at once open and closed. Alone, he still wants it: the dance, the girl, the escape, the life people said he couldn’t have. He has long since kicked off those Sunday shoes.
The best bad songs thrill and shame at the same time. They win you over with their exaltations. Soon, you’re singing out loud while driving. You’re dancing in your house. Maybe some karaoke? You get to have this, for just a little while, before returning to the land of self-conscious self-regard. “Footloose” is a glorious song because it wants us not to care. This is where nostalgia and critique meet up and decide if they’re going to become anxiety or joy. This is me feeling fuck everything and I’m so dumb at the same time, listening to “Footloose.”
A good bad song isn’t a guilty pleasure; it’s a pleasure because of the guilt. It’s procrastination. It’s that feeling when you know something is a little bit wrong but you do it anyway, because the moment now feels better than the future reckoning. If Kenny Loggins has made a career of this, he has won. I have known his voice for more years of my life than not. All those car rides, all those radio stations, all those minutes waiting in some place where someone else’s music has got me fixed, pinned down. We are all of us trying to get through, trying to be and to change, but those old songs are staying the same. That’s what they’re meant to do. Out of nowhere Kenny Loggins will grab our hands: remember me? Come here. Take me back. Please, Louise. Pull me off of my knees. And we do, because we know exactly what to expect and how good it feels—this is how good it can be—those two or three minutes when we can pretend to be somewhere or someone else, there beyond the outskirts of town.

Beth Nguyen once got a speeding ticket because she was listening to “Footloose.” She confesses that her favorite song from that movie soundtrack is Deniece Williams’s “Let’s Hear It for the Boy.” She also writes books and teaches creative writing at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.