One person’s view: “An important lesson I learned as a kid, watching the video for this awful awfulness, was that people you love, or simply admire, always let you down.” – blackmore4 @ Rate Your Music
The public’s view: 2.40 / 5.00, the second-worst #1 hit of 1982
Paul McCartney isn’t known for his protest songs. He’s just not the type of person who gets angry enough to write or sing them effectively. Even when he focuses on animal rights and vegetarianism, causes that he cares passionately about, he usually winds up with something like “Meat Free Monday”. That song leaves me with the impression that I could take a bite out of a live calf right in front of him, and he’d be fine with it as long as it’s on a different day of the week.
Let’s look at a few of his efforts at angry music. There’s “Big Boys Bickering”, in which he literally cusses about politicians but doesn’t specify who he is mad at or why. There’s “Give Ireland Back to the Irish”, which may be his most potent and direct political song but not one that he followed up with any notable action. Many people expected him to join the I.R.A. or assassinate a member of the Royal Family after that, and he never did. One time he made a song called “Angry” that had some angry lyrics, but he sounded like he was having too much fun on it to really be upset. Let’s face it: Paul McCartney is not Rage Against the Machine. He’s more like the Machine.
So, it’s no surprise that “Ebony and Ivory” is one of the least angry songs about racism ever written. It’s so blasé about the issue that the apartheid government of South Africa didn’t bother banning it until Stevie Wonder antagonized them over something else a couple of years later.
With that in mind, I’m going to judge “Ebony and Ivory” on its musical merits rather than all of the social progress that didn’t happen after it was released. It’s a cute but repetitive song with one of those unintentionally hilarious videos that were so common in 1982. It deserved to hit #8 on the Hot 100 and get some moderate airplay for a couple months. It did not deserve to spend 7 weeks at #1 and be heard every 15 minutes on the radio in every godforsaken family station wagon that was driving 13 hours to Myrtle Beach that summer. And yes, I speak from having lived this trauma.
But the legacy of “Ebony and Ivory” is more damaging than just a ruined road trip. It set the stage for the primary duet formula of the 1980s: 1) Get two superstars together, often two people who have much less chemistry with each other than what we heard from Paul and Stevie. 2) Have them record material that is far inferior to anything that either of them would have come up with on his own. 3) Watch it soar up the charts before anyone gets the chance to say, “You know, that really wasn’t such a great idea.”
I’ll cite a particularly egregious example of this type of pairing. In 1984, I began hearing excited talk on the radio and on MTV that Michael Jackson and Mick Jagger had worked on a song together. My brother and I tuned in as one of the local radio stations premiered the highly awaited track. After listening to four and a half minutes of a repetitive guitar riff and the most amateurish rhymes imaginable, both of us spontaneously burst into laughter. “State of Shock” was the least amount of effort anyone had put into a record all year, and yet we knew it was going gold.
“Ebony and Ivory” is not as bad as many of these later duets. But in a year that saw major successes by the J. Geils Band, Joan Jett, John Cougar Mellencamp, Men at Work, and the Go-Go’s, there was no need for a trite bit of adult contemporary to become the biggest song of the summer.
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