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If you don't understand why this single gets an entry on a lost hits blog and "Hungry Eyes" doesn't, ask an adult.
We wanna hear that everything bips. Everything bips, flips, and skips. This record was actually a hit a couple years before I came up with the expression, "Because it bips." Those words are a catch-all answer to any "why" question. About 30 years after that, I was surprised at how many adults were suddenly picking up that expression and getting their retired parents to use it too.
This lost hit also came a few years before Eric Carmen's much-hyped comeback that included a couple top 5 smashes. The first of these was "Hungry Eyes", which seems to still be played on regular radio more than just about any other hit from that era. Someone on Facebook asked whether "Hungry Eyes" was the last big "yacht rock" hit, and you can make a case for it, though we can think of a couple substantial hits that came later that may also qualify. On the other hand, "yacht rock" diehards often exclude everything after about 1983 from even being part of that genre, even if it should qualify on musical grounds.
The second hit in Eric's comeback string was "Make Me Lose Control", which itself was still regularly rotated on radio years after it was a hit. It was still in circulation during the brief period when I had a website about Cincinnati radio that had an entry for each station. (That was before I had a message board to that effect, which got shut down almost immediately because I dared to criticize the George W. Bush regime's further lifting of ownership caps.) For the entry for one of the many stations in the area with an adult contemporary format, I noted that it still played "Make Me Lose Control", and I wrote something like, "This station will make you lose control of your bladder!"
As for "I Wanna Hear It From Your Lips", Eric reportedly once called his own video for it "creepy", because it had so much background sound. Also, the woman in the video bears a striking resemblance to the woman in the mid-'80s commercials for Care-Free bubble gum, except her hair is a different color. But I'm not too inclined to think they're the same person.
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