(7) BARRY MANILOW, “I WRITE THE SONGS”
CLOSED DOWN
(6) DONNA SUMMER, “MACARTHUR PARK”
154-141
AND WILL PLAY IN THE ELITE 8

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 March 19.

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.

MOIRA MCAVOY ON “MACARTHUR PARK”

A car ride to or from school has to be where I first heard “MacArthur Park,” the first song of Donna Summer’s to hit number one in the US. That fact alone seems improbable; Summer’s “I Feel Love” helped to popularize disco as we know it, igniting the airwaves and encompassing clubs across the country in 1977. The song is maximalism perfected; innumerable manufactured layers coalesce in precise harmony, precariously walking the line between cacophony and synthetic symphony, sticking the landing to the latter. Synths and drum machines swirl around Summer’s melodious voice, the one that made her famous on the German theater scene, as she repeats a handful of lines over and over, the final product a hypnotic ride that, when listened to at a high enough volume or on good enough headphones, feels all-consuming: body, mind, emotions.
Yet, this song did not hit number one, nor did her first breakout single “Love To Love You Baby,” a track which introduced the disco sound to a wider audience. No, instead the song that finally made the Queen of Disco the Queen of the Airwaves was “MacArthur Park,” her seven minute long cover of a Richard Harris (yes, that Richard Harris) folk ballad from years prior. The Harris original is frequently cited as one of the worst songs of all time, what with its lyrics both maudlin and confusing, non-linear melody, and a lacking vocal performance from the actor-attempting-turned-singer. That version, to be clear, is an absolute train wreck, and rightfully deserves the slander it has received for decades. It has too many elements melded with too little artistry. It takes a concept built of excess and tries to fit it into a genre of restraint, doomed from the start.
Pulling off maximalism in folk may have been the high sell which sank Harris, but I would argue the song’s excess—in lyrics, melodic movements, concepts—is what makes it such a successful target for someone like Donna Summer, a broadway actress working to invent a genre defined by toomuchedness. Here we have a landscape where horns and vocals and drums and a synth line can all work to complement each other. There’s no one player vying for the spotlight like in Harris’ folk rendition, but instead many working to be a seamless unit. Here we have a place where an extended instrumental interlude can not only work but seems necessary, a break between narrative acts, lending a sense of artistic credence to the otherwise semi-nonsensical lyrics. Here we have an environment where the most basic part of the song—a deep sadness, a desperate longing—can be elevated past its own mawkishness into something transcendent without being self-indulgent. This song, as written, is not perfect, but it is certainly perfect for disco, for someone with such a command for the maximalist as Donna Summer.
I listen to music constantly and voraciously: while lying in bed procrastinating getting ready for work, on the commute to work, at work, on the way home, while shopping, while cooking, while cleaning, while falling asleep and beyond, the algorithm dictating a playlist unheard until I awaken bleary-eyed and confused hours later. I love music for a multitude of reasons—it’s fun; it’s heartbreaking; it allows me to better communicate my emotions to others; it allows me to better communicate my emotions to myself.—but as much as i love music, I hate silence. The openness and possibility makes me uncomfortable, eager, awkward and anxious. I will talk when I have nothing to say just to fill the air with something. When living alone for years, I blasted my iPhone and tv simultaneously in a desperate attempt to fill every lonely corner with even the possibility of meaning or connection. I want something else everywhere, all the time.
This, of course, is not unique to me in the slightest; it’s not even unique to me in my family. My love of music and fear of silence was inherited from both of my parents, and the majority of my prominent early childhood memories are built around music: my father braving the crowds of young children to take me to an Aaron Carter concert; my mother teaching me to do the Hustle in my grandmother’s kitchen; my father making up songs to sing my brother & i to sleep, the same melody every time until eventually deciding to sing us to sleep with “Silent Night”. Music was everywhere, and no place more obviously than the car radio on the way to school, or Mass, or a Girl Scouts meeting, or a road trip to New Jersey. I grew up on the border of the boondocks, so there was ample opportunity to hear my parents’ choices of music while growing up and going literally anywhere. My father liked country, Twisted Sister, and ABBA whereas my mother was pure oldies, particularly the girl groups of the sixties and the divas of disco a decade later.
As she worked as a librarian at my elementary school, she drove my brother & I to school more days than not—and still often dictated the music when she did not—which practically guaranteed us a steady flow of disco for the nearly two hours we’d spend commuting each day. When the radio stations were playing too many commercials (often) or not enough of the Good Stuff (also often), my mother would opt to delve into the overstuffed metallic silver CD case she kept in the front seat, fishing for a suitable substitute. One of her favorites was a Donna Summer greatest hits collection which prominently featured the seventeen minute long mix of the “MacArthur Park” suite, a sequence of four songs played live together as one movement. There were other incredible tracks included (including her 1978 classic “Heaven Knows,” a pop song so poised in its desperate lyrics and uptempo musicality that the likes of Robyn and Janelle Monae should bow to it), but the one that always stuck out to my brother and I was “MacArthur Park.” We mostly requested it as either the cake song, after the prominent image of a cake being destroyed by rain in the eponymous park, or the Dumbledore song, as we were young children in the early 2000s wherein Harry Potter was our only frame of reference for most things. Of course, my mother complied, thrilled to have an opportunity to play the music she loved without judgment or whining from her children.
That’s how I remember it, at least. While fact checking a detail for this piece with my mother, she reminded me that we saw Donna perform MacArthur Park on the Today Show when we were five, an event I completely forgot. The only thing I remember from that trip to New York is eating hot dogs for any and every meal possible and seeing dinosaurs at a museum. Further, she mentioned that we almost never asked for the song on car rides, and that we only began to tolerate it after she told us about the Dumbledore connection. More gallingly to me, she said that we preferred the Richard Harris version, which I choose to believe was because we were children; we liked things that were familiar instead of things that were good.
I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about the music in my life as a child as I’ve gotten older. There’s the shining memories, to be sure, but there’s more: the pop music I played on my walkman to drown out my parents arguing, the everpresent static over the Radio Disney station that hummed in the background of my childhood insomnia. Music has continued to be a means of escape in my adult life, so it makes sense that it developed as one as a child. Our family car rides were not always pleasant; more often than not they were mired with at least one fight, if not more, and I was frequently the antagonist. The music was occasionally an annoyance but it was more frequently a mediator, a distraction. Disco played over our discord, absorbing it and amplifying it until it dissipated.
The most interesting aspect of the Donna Summer rendition of “MacArthur Park” is not just its leaning into maximalism, but its total reimagination of what was already widely known. The best covers are those which either strictly adhere to the original or which wildly re-envision it: anything less and the weakness shows. Here, we see an artist take something abhorrent and make it endearing, a dirge into a dance. Memory is what we make of it, and here, she made it into a hit. It’s easy to romanticize the past, but it’s another thing entirely to reconstruct it.
I love it now, but maybe I didn’t like “MacArthur Park” at the time, or if I only liked the connection to Dumbledore, or maybe I reveled in the absurdity of a song I, as a child, thought to be literally about cake. The why mattered less then, and the specifics matter less now. As an essayist, I feel compelled to be driven by the facts, but I’m hesitant to place weight on them compared to what I feel in response to these memories, altered or otherwise. What matters was that we together embarked on all seventeen minutes of the song (before tiring after three or four), and would listen as my mother lip synced over the steering wheel, making jokes about cake and characters, bonded by this sound all around us. 

Moira McAvoy genuinely loves many bad songs and appreciates the opportunity to defend their virtue in writing. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, The Financial Diet, Storyscape, and others. You can find her destroying her hearing at a show, or more immediately tweeting at @moyruhjo.