August 28th, 2007Victoria Beckham releasing “Greatest Hits”
This summer, millions of Americans eagerly anticipated the arrival of international superstar David Beckham, only to discover, to their dismay, that he plays soccer.
By most accounts, Beckham plays the sport incredibly well — experts say he excels at both kicking the ball and not touching it with his hands. But those skills — impressive as they are — don’t really hold Americans’ attention.
I actually kind of like soccer, but I understand why Americans aren’t interested. As an intellectual pursuit, it simply does not compare to hitting a ball with a stick or throwing a ball into a hoop.
Beckham is famous at least partly because he has a famous wife, the former Posh Spice, who achieved her fame the old-fashioned way: by making really bad music. This is a rare skill. You must have some talent but no taste.
Victoria Beckham and her fellow Spice Girls are actually releasing a “Greatest Hits” album. I’ll grant them the “hits,” but I draw the line at “greatest.” Greatest of what? Did the Spice Girls have other hits that they left off the album because, looking back, the songs were not up to the Spice Girls’ high artistic standards?
I doubt the Spice Girls could have succeeded in the 1980s, which was the golden era of popular bad music. I’m not the only historian who feels this way. Go ask Doris Kearns Goodwin or David McCullough. They’ll tell you.
The ’80s featured a remarkable number of musicians who, in baseball parlance, had “all the tools”: impossibly bad hair; the hand-eye coordination to play the electric guitar while frantically shaking it up and down, as though their beloved pet iguana was stuck inside it; the ability to convince themselves they were singing, and a friend who was willing to play the drums while ingesting a superhuman quantity of drugs for the benefit of future VH1 viewers.
In the ’80s, Quiet Riot had a mega-hit with the following lyrics:
“So you see I got a funny face, I got no worries! And I don’t know why, I don’t know why.”
These were the most meaningful lyrics in the song. How did this inspiration strike Quiet Riot? I assume one of the guys in the band turned to another and said, “Hey, you’ve got a funny face — let’s build around that.”
And how many times did the Quiet Rioters tweak the lyrics before getting it right? ” ‘So you see I’ve got a funny face, but I’m OK with that’ … no, wait, let’s go stronger.”
What if one of the guys in the band had said, “Hey, maybe we should just allude to some insecurity about the facial features.” He would have been kicked out of the band, right? That’s no way to write a hit song.
