first round

(10) limahl, “the neverending story”
outlasted
(7) force m.d.’s, “tender love”
275-106
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 3/4/23.

darcy jay gagnon on “tender love”

If you are unfamiliar with this song, I encourage you to watch the music video on mute and try to imagine the song this 80’s pop R&B boyband, Force MDs, is singing too. With the exception of that cheeky “shhhhh” gesture before the first verse, the way these men playfully groove might suggest that there is some presence of a bassline to the song. And certainly by the 1:00 minute mark, when some pretty whatever choreography kicks in, we are surely thinking that some drums must have arrived.
But if you are familiar with the song but not the music video, you are probably wondering wtf these guys are dancing to because this song is a B-A-L-L-A-D-ballad. No snare, no bass—just an objectively catchy piano loop and eventually some spooky laser stuff (my guess is the “glass harmonica” setting on your standard 80’s Casio synth). It’s almost like the director of got the demo version and assumed more instrumentation would be added later.
Still, it’s a darling little music video to an equally darling song, and one that could have leaned a little further into the Romeo/Juliet schematic if not for the fact that it looks like everyone’s having a blast singing about that ten-der love instead of choking on tender love potions. By the way, I made up that theory about the director assuming more instrumentation would be added, but it could be true! The writers of the song—Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis—admitted that were asked to come up with a song in less than 24 hours for an upcoming movie soundtrack, so time could have been a factor for absence of instrumentation.
The movie was Krush Groove, which tells the story of how Russell Simmons started Def Jam Recordings, and features cameos from Run D.M.C, Beastie Boys, LL Cool J, Debbie Harry, and loads of others. It’s clearly a work of fiction, the most preeminent fiction being that Russell Simmons started Def Jam when it was def Rick Rubin, but I guess people in the 80’s didn’t really want to see a white hip-hop producer protagonist. Though time has shown us that Russell Simmons doesn’t deserve all that attention (and as of writing this, Rubin still seems like a pretty rad dude!).
In Krush Groove, “Tender Love” plays during a sex scene between Russell Simmons’ character (played by Blair Underwood) and the percussionist, singer, and longtime Prince collaborator Sheila E. (played by herself). The sex scene is truly lame and the only redeeming part of it is the music. Sheila E later revealed she was terrified to do the scene because she was worried about making Prince jealous, which might explain its overall timidness. As one YouTube commenter accurately described the love scene: “Ok aside from the beautiful music WTF are they doing. Like seriously pay attention non of what their doing makes sense.” But yeah; good song.
Barack Obama once namedropped Force MDs in an interview about what songs were on his Air Force One playlist. I know to take Obama’s music plugs with a grain of salt, as, even though I look forward to his annual lists, I recognize how manufactured they probably are (imagine Obama earnestly listening to Brandi Carlile. Try it).
But Obama being drawn to a song like “Tender Love” makes sense, I think—it syncs up in terms of his age, what we know about his taste in pop R&B, and what we know about his taste in love, which, from what we have seen of his relationship with Michelle Obama, seems like an especially tender love. It’s easy to picture our former president at the podium, surprising us with a couple bars of “Tender Love,” real slick like, real slow. Or conjure this—him singing the chorus to Michelle, just the two of them—a scene I find so sweet, so believable, so tender, that it justifies a little white space.

*

When Danielle Haim was writing “Summer Girl,” she knew she wanted to write a song with one of the most basic, amateur drum beats: “…It's kind of a pattern that when you go to Guitar Center and a kid sits on the drums, it's the first pattern that they play.”
Before writing “Cranes in the Sky,” Solange stumbled upon a strings loop on a CD of instrumentals a producer had given her a long time ago. They tried forever to track down the sample so they could dissect it, make it fit into a song structure Solange imagined, but when they were unable to, she kept the loop intact and wrote the song around it instead.
For The Raveonettes’ first (best, and most underrated) record, Whip It On, the duo stuck to a certain set of criteria: each song had to be in B-Flat minor, under three minutes, and under three chords.
There is something obvious to be said here about how limitations, intentional (in Danielle Haim’s case) or unintentional (re: Solange), can produce creativity, which was maybe the case for Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis as they had to push out this ballad deserving of Sheila E’s presence in one day. But more so…it’s also just fun, and you can sense that when you watch videos of Jam and Lewis performing the song: “So simple…very musical, very melodic, but so, so simple,” says Lewis of the song.
Similarly, Danielle Haim being determined to use the classic Guitar Center beat, while already well into an accomplished career, is objectively funny and extremely playful, adding an air of levity to what turned into a kind of tribute to Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” (which is also sort of fun!).
I told my writing students one time that “fun” is a boring emotion, and the proof is that there is only one way to describe fun while there are dozens of ways to describe sadness. It turns a great way to boost student engagement is to say edgy bullshit because for most of the rest of class they continually shouted out things like “elated!” and “jovial!” and other fun synonyms until I finally admitted defeat.
So yes, “Tender Love” is a catchy little 24-hour whatever. It’s an earworm. But for a B-A-L-L-A-D-ballad, it’s also pretty fun, as you saw by the boys dancing to piano songs on the stoop. And like, that’s fine. Obama wasn’t going to gain any clout with republicans for name dropping urban-contemporary R&B one hit wonders in an interview but it’s kind of funny anyways. Even the act of me doing this silly thing—forcing myself to write about a song I would never decide to write about otherwise, to be read by mostly other writers and maybe a member or two from Force MDs (shoutout Force MDs!), and even then probably won’t even get that many clicks since Elon fucked up Twitter (eat shit Elon!)—is in the spirit of funness.
So that’s what I think about mostly when I watch this music video for the umpteenth time, as the boy group does their spins and snaps, their shushing and story-telling about tender love. And the piano loop goes on and on and on. They’re having so much fun.

Darcy Jay Gagnon is an essayist from Washington D.C. and a nonfiction features editor at The Rumpus. His favorite one-hit-wonder is "Groove Is In the Heart." You can find his work at Gulf Coast, Entropy, Essay Daily, and elsewhere.

Fantasia on the Dance Floor: Limahl and Miracles of “The NeverEnding Story” by erin keane

If you heard the song before you saw the movie, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were in for a simple good time. “Turn around,” Limahl croons to the buoyant beat, drawing out the final vowel of the opening line into a gleeful run. “Look at what you see.” Giorgio Moroder, our Father of Disco, was onto something when he composed his “Never Ending Story” fantasy anthem’s shimmering flourishes, its soaring peaks and valleys carrying Keith Forsey’s lyrics like a flight on a Luck Dragon’s back. We needed this confection, a dose of misdirection from the anguish we will first endure.
Do you feel a twirl coming on? I do. I want to rush a dance floor in a storm of balloons, dedicate this one to my lost friends. When I dance, I always close my eyes. I can bring them all back that way.
“It’s still a song I play as a DJ and people still love it, especially the girls,” Moroder, that mad genius of timeless soundtracks, said in a 2018 interview. “The ladies, let’s say 40 years old or so, they all heard the song when they were children. It stays in their head. They love it.”
When Beth Anderson layers in on, “Make believe I’m everywhere, I’m hidden in the lines,” it sure sounds romantic. That’s how Stranger Things season 3 sells it anyway, when, to coax a crucial piece of information out of his genius long-distance girlfriend Suzie, unlikely hero Dustin engages in this duet over a radio with all his skeptical friends listening in.
What do the girls—the ladies, let’s say 40 years old or so—really love about this song? The movie set off a chain reaction for me: The NeverEnding Story raced a snail so Labyrinth could dance so The Princess Bride could joke so Shrek could ruin “Hallelujah” so Stranger Things could weaponize our fantasies into horror. Unlike later tracks Stranger Things pulled out of the crates of my youth, “Never Ending Story” is not an alienation anthem, as its big TV moment shared by two dorks in puppy love underscores. It presupposes connection, tapping into a feeling less retro and more like ancient, despite its disco-meets-New Wave sound. Like all of Giorgio Moroder’s big soundtrack hits—consider Blondie’s “Call Me,” Irene Cara’s “Flashdance … What a Feeling,” Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away”—the song and the movie are impossible for me to separate. And so, no matter what age I am when I hear this song playing, it takes me back to a time before cool, when we were Childlike Empresses waiting open-hearted for our new names, or Atreyus on a quest to find Bastian, the one who could bestow them.
The singer, Limahl—he of the gravity-defying hair, the baby-soft features, the gentle seeking eyes, a perfectly safe gay crush for the ladies, let’s say 40 years old or so, to have tended in their girlhoods thanks to Wolfgang Petersen’s video—is a one-hit wonder only in the strictest sense of the term. Born Christopher Hamill before he gave himself a faux-exotic stage name, an anagram of his last name, Limahl was also the front man of the English band Kajagoogoo, whose lead single “Too Shy” off their debut album White Feathers rose to Number 5 on the Billboard Hot 100.
And then the band fired him. Over the phone. “I was absolutely betrayed,” he said in a 2019 interview. To be flying so high one minute, only to be left behind. It is a story any girl who has navigated the dumpster treachery of school feels hard.
And about a year later, Giorgio Moroder’s people called. When “Never Ending Story” broke through on the charts, it put Limahl in rare company. He became not a two-hit wonder, but rather a one-hit wonder twice over. I’ve by no means exhausted the research on this matter but it seems terribly difficult to do what Limahl did, to achieve one-hit wonder status as both a member of a group and as a solo artist. You could say CeeLo Green. You could get deep in the weeds on Dave Stewart if you pretended the Eurythmics didn’t exist. Safe to say it’s uncommon. You have to respect it.
Not that Limahl had a lock on the job. “Never Ending Story” is a bit higher than Limahl’s vocal sweet spot, and as he tells it, he partied the night before his audition and arrived hungover to Berlin where he kinda blew it at first. That’s the thing about second chances: We’re not always great at recognizing the door when it opens. Moroder, who knew what he wanted from a movie soundtrack theme, was patient, teased it out of him, and on the second try, Limahl nailed it. Two hits—one under Kajagoogoo, and one under his chosen name—should disqualify Limahl from a conversation about one-hit wonders, but if anyone knows the power something as simple as a name change can bring about, it’s The NeverEnding Story fans.
It's become common to look back on ‘80s movies for kids and wonder at the earnest, unfiltered emotional brutality of them, but it’s hard to say what an acceptable alternative would have been. We watched the things we couldn’t talk about and spoke in a shorthand collage that nodded to those indelible scenes. Parents for the most part were not our best friends. Who even had a therapist? The world felt strange and unknowable and adults acted like we couldn’t hear them talking. That scream of Bastian’s, the one that crossed dimensions? I heard it, too.
Step off the dance floor with me. Turn around. Look at what you see: An attic, jumbled with maps and skeletons and taxidermies, a secret hiding place at school where this average sad boy could hide from the world with a book that he swiped off a grumpy antiquarian who knew what he was doing. (If you don’t think you would have taken refuge in such an attic and let yourself be swept away into an epic tale by candlelight, I don’t think we can be friends.) Before this book, the average boy woke up next to the one he fell asleep reading. His dad is all business. This boy, Bastian, tells dad that he dreamed about his mother. Business dad doesn’t want to hear it. “We can't let Mom's death be an excuse for not getting the old job done, right?”
At eight, nine, ten years old I didn’t understand that dead parents are just a trope in children’s stories because otherwise there’s too much supervision, too much security, too much love. When my father died, I took those stories personally. Bastian and me, we were going through it. I understood all too well why he couldn’t bring his head out of the clouds. We knew there was no such thing as a story that never ends. It was midnight in the Howling Forest all day long, and we were supposed to give it our all, what, in gym class? I needed any refuge from the Nothing I could find.  
Turn the radio off for a minute. Sit down and watch with me. See the Nothing as it rolls in. It obliterates everything. Creatures large and small are on the run and their only hope is a champion named Atreyu, who will fight to save the Childlike Empress, the being whose energy powers Fantasia and who is losing that energy to the Nothing.
Turn around. Look at what you see: Atreyu is just a little boy on horseback, armed with a bow, his courage and an amulet designed to protect him. Atreyu is being asked to do something impossible, but kids are always being asked to do things that seem impossible at first.
We can't let the encroaching Nothing be an excuse for not getting the old job done, right?
How does the song go again? “Rhymes that keep their secrets / Will unfold behind the clouds,” Limahl and Anderson sing in ethereal harmony. Pull up a blanket. Find the matches, light the candles. Ration this sandwich as a hedge against the hunger. You probably know what time it is.
We have to talk about Artax, Atreyu’s horse and best friend, drowning in the Swamp of Sadness.
“Everyone knew that whoever let the sadness overtake him would sink into the swamp.” The warning didn’t make it any easier to watch.
Turn around, Atreyu: Look at what you see. Artax is stuck, his own weight pulling him down. Atreyu tries to pull him out, but the muck is too strong, and Artax doesn’t have the strength.
“Artax, you’re sinking! Turn around!” Atreyu screams.
“You have to try. You have to care,” he pleads. He’s just a boy, sent on an impossible quest. This is our champion? Or, of course he is. He just doesn’t know what his real mission is yet.
Atreyu looks into the camera, tears running down his face. Cut to Bastian in the school attic who looks up from the book, tears streaming down his face. Cut to me as a child, watching for the first time, utterly unprepared to witness this. Atreyu, our hero, could fail? And Artax could sink while Atreyu walks out on his own feet? What was Artax carrying that Atreyu couldn’t see?
Cut to me now, watching again as an adult. We can’t let Artax’s death be an excuse for not getting the old job done, right? Tell me what we couldn’t see unfolding behind the clouds. Even Bastian and I, who thought we already knew what there was to know about how stories end, were devastated by the unfairness. Atreyu was wrong when he thought Artax was dying because he didn’t care enough. I hear Morloch the Mountain’s resigned sigh—“we do not care … whether or not we care”—not as apathy now but as the raw material that builds a defensive shell. But Morloch the Mountain is also stuck, that shell too heavy to ever lift into the air.
I will let Giorgio Moroder and Limahl in on a secret: If it weren’t for their song, then that moment—Artax in the swamp, Atreyu trying and failing to save him—would be the only thing, pretty much, I would remember about this movie. The story would begin in the swamp and end with Morloch, with Atreyu defeated, feeling it was all for nothing. It’s the song that helps me remember what happens next:
Atreyu turns around. He trudges back through the waters that claimed Artax with a wolf on his heels, and who should swoop down to save him from the swamp or the black dog or whatever we’re calling despair today but Falkor, the Luck Dragon. Look at what you see: Falkor is a miracle incarnate, made of all good things, both wise and innocent, fearless and tender, nurturing and fierce. If this song had a texture I could run my fingers across, Falkor’s incandescent feathery fur would be it. I can forget this as easily as I can forget how the film ends,  with Bastian soaring through Fantasia on Falkor’s back: In the beginning, it is always dark. That’s when we’re free to build.
Bastian shouts Moon Child’s name and becomes a champion; his scream across dimensions brings Artax and Atreyu back to life. Moroder gives Limahl a second chance at his audition, and he’s back on Solid Gold.
Years later, Limahl’s second chance had its own comeback thanks to Dustin and Suzie’s duet on Stranger Things. Charts look different now, and so does a hit: A surge in streams of “The NeverEnding Story” put it almost to the top of Spotify’s U.S. Viral 50 chart, and YouTube demand for the video increased by 800 percent.
It is tempting to point to this resurrection as proof of the song’s timelessness, of it having earned its neverending status. But what if I told you it didn’t need a second life to prove its worth? Without Falkor, the swamp wins. Without the song to remind me of Falkor, all I can remember is Atreyu’s anguished witness, not Bastian’s eventual triumph. Look again at the name we gave the phenomenon of the singular hit. Consider what an honor it is to bear it. Wonder is another way of saying miracle, which is to say—for three minutes and thirty glorious seconds, before you beg the DJ to play it again—a mirror of your dreams.

Erin Keane is the author of RUNAWAY: Notes on the Myths That Made Me (Belt Publishing), one of NPR's Best Books of 2022, as well as three collections of poems. She is Chief Content Officer at Salon and teaches creative nonfiction, poetry, and professional writing in the Sena Jeter Naslund-Karen Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University.