Rate Your Music score: 3.11 out of 5!
"Then you went and spoiled the whole thing, baby...In front of everyone..."
I like certain words - especially words that convey negative actions, events, or feelings.
I especially enjoy it when these words appear in hit song lyrics.
I'm particularly fond of a certain set of words that mean pretty much the same thing. One of these words is ruin and its various forms. We can give credit to "China Girl" by David Bowie for the line, "I'll ruin everything you are," and "She's Always A Woman" by Billy Joel for the line, "She can ruin your faith with her casual lies." I always liked "Watching The Wheels" by John Lennon because it used ruin in its noun form.
Another song I always liked was "Hang On In There Baby" by Johnny Bristol, because it was one of few songs that used the word destroy - which means practically the same thing as ruin.
A word that often means something similar to ruin and destroy is spoil. And Jeffrey Osborne came through with the lost hit we're profiling today!
If he had instead sung, "Then you went and ruined the whole thing," it would have meant the same thing. Either way, every time I listened to the radio - or many years later, fired up a batch of MP3's I had purchased - and I heard that shuffling intro and that dramatic flourish with the strings, I knew I was going to hear Jeffrey sing about some event being spoiled, ruined, destroyed.
Another set of synonyms I like is tirade and harangue.
I didn't always appreciate Jeffrey's lost hit as much as I do now. Remember, it was popular in 1983, when I didn't appreciate much of anything that wasn't Men At Work. I also had bad luck that a project I started about a year earlier to poke fun at my 3rd grade teachers got ridiculously out of hand. When it moved on from teachers to well-known music performers, I always came up with jokes that included their lyrics. Thus, whenever this song came on the radio, I would glance at the radio and say, "Don't you get so mad" about being included in this endeavor.
Around the same time, I would also sing, "Chris de Burgh said, 'There is trouble ahead.'" This was a spoof of a line in Chris's now-lost hit "Don't Pay The Ferryman."
The "Don't You Get So Mad" saga didn't end in 1983. In 1990, Jeffrey was part of what appeared to be a command performance ordered by George H.W. Bush that took place at the White House. He sang this lost hit during that event. But the instrumentation at this concert was vastly different from the hit record. Although the version on the record conveyed excitement, the White House performance was accompanied by an orchestra that acted as if it was an episode of The Lawrence Welk Show...
The Bushes were so stodgy and had so little appreciation for modern music that this was about the upper limit of what they could handle. They had to have a pop chart hit from 7 years earlier toned down to make it suitable for their fogeyish tastes.
They went and spoiled the whole thing in front of everyone.
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