One person’s view: “The music is uninteresting at its best, but usually it’s actually bad or annoying.” – ListyGuy @ Rate Your Music (reviewing the The One That You Love LP)
The public’s view: 2.12 / 5.00, the worst #1 hit of 1981
Radio programming expert Guy Zapoleon theorizes that pop music radio (and, by extension, the Hot 100 chart) is locked into a never-ending cycle that repeats itself roughly once every ten years. There’s a boom period in which everyone and their uncle is listening to top 40 radio, and everybody knows and tolerates the songs that are topping the charts. After a while, the music industry starts pushing the genre boundaries and stations are forced to play more divisive records that many people dislike. Ratings begin to fall. Eventually, some pop stations splinter off into other formats while the remaining ones lapse into a conservative, defensive posture. This leads to a period known as a “doldrums” in which top 40 radio is dominated by dull ballads and older, overplayed records, while only a few newer tracks are able to break onto the airwaves. Eventually there is some kind of stimulus, perhaps a new source of competition, that forces radio stations to snap out of their trance.
Although the Zapoleon Cycle had not yet been discovered, it is clear in hindsight that the storm clouds were gathering in 1979. That was the year that one of my local pop music stations, in a fit of comically bad timing, switched to an all-disco format. This station had been the American Top 40 affiliate, and now there was no way for me to hear Casey Kasem. Two new broadcasters arrived soon afterwards, but they failed to fill the gap. They played a freshly invented format that was marketed under various names: “adult contemporary”, “soft rock”, “lite rock”, and “auditory torture”. My parents bought into the hype and I was made to hear these new FM stations often. Meanwhile, the remaining top 40 outlet desperately tried to retain older listeners by playing the same wimpy songs as these upstarts. By the time 1981 arrived, listening to the radio was as much fun as being stuck behind someone going 50 m.p.h. in the passing lane on the freeway. We were in the depths of a doldrums.
You could make a strong case for Christopher Cross as the poster boy for the doldrums, but he at least had some critical acclaim and Grammy-winning gravitas. Lionel Richie probably made more money off of the crisis than anyone else, but he hadn’t yet completely squandered the R&B credibility that he had earned from the Commodores. In my opinion, no act symbolizes the 1980s doldrums more than Air Supply. The success of Air Supply depended entirely on the soft rock dominance of the radio dial. The band’s record sales soared along with that dynamic in 1980, and then collapsed when stations revitalized their playlists in 1983 and 1984 after realizing that they were losing out to MTV.
Although the group is forever linked to that dark era, I don’t think that Air Supply is nearly as bad as the history books say. Their songs usually had a strong melody and a decent hook which made them more palatable than the truly sleepy ballads that were so pervasive in the early 1980s. (I’d rather hear literally any Air Supply record than Kenny Rogers singing “Lady”.) Air Supply mixed things up by using two lead singers, and unlike most bands with multiple lead singers the members weren’t constantly threatening to punch each other in the face. Admittedly, they followed a formula: start with the word “love” and then string related stuff around it. If there is an Air Supply song about a topic other than love, I’ve never heard it. But they were masters of this formula, and they didn’t attempt a half-assed pivot to some other genre when the adult contemporary gravy train dried up. I respect them. That being said, “The One That You Love” reached #1 only through the capriciousness of the chart gods.
“The One That You Love” was composed by guitarist and co-lead singer Graham Russell before outside writers commandeered most of the band’s output. The song features some inelegant lyrics about a couple that is on the verge of splitting up. “We have the right, you know,” is probably the most political statement that Air Supply has ever made, but we never learn which right they are referring to. Freedom of the press? Indictment by grand jury? And when Russell comes in on the bridge, he sings his one and only line in an absurdly high voice that doesn’t fit with anything else. I think he’s supposed to represent a supernatural presence who warns the other singer that time has run out to convince his woman to stay. Maybe she invoked her right to a speedy trial and is getting the hell out of the song.
As muddled as it is, it’s no surprise that Rate Your Music users have given “The One That You Love” the lowest rating of any of Air Supply’s major hits. Yet Russell also wrote two of Air Supply’s very best songs: “Lost in Love” and “All Out of Love”. (Did I mention that these guys really liked singing about love?) Either of these would have represented the band honorably in the pantheon of #1 singles, but both fell just short of that chart position. I especially like “Lost in Love”, though I cringe at some aspects of the production. Were those whooshing noises added deliberately, or did someone keep flushing the toilet in the studio while the band was working?
We’re now up to the point at which music videos play a role in how we remember each #1 hit. At 1:22 of “The One That You Love” there is a slow motion scene of singer Russell Hitchcock watching a woman go down a playground slide. If you could sum up the 1980s doldrums with one ridiculous visual, this would be it. Air Supply has complained that MTV never played their videos, but maybe the network did them a favor on this one.
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