You know, we've gone this whole month and we haven't even acknowledged Pride Month.
This song, originally pitched to Anne Murray, was written by Tom Kelly and Billy Steinberg about Kelly's mother. When Cyndi Lauper got a hold of the song, it became something so much bigger - a song of empowerment and encouragement.
It was also become an anthem of LGBTQ pride. In fact, the song resonated with Lauper specifically because she had recently lost a good friend to AIDS - a good friend who had been ejected from his home at age 12 for the crime of being gay. One of the great things that Lauper has done is founded the charity now known as True Colors United, a group dedicated to the unique problems of LGBTQ youth homelessness.
If I were to ask you "what was the first US Top Ten hit by Genesis", you'd be hard pressed to come up with this 1983 hit. And yet, this little song with a Ringo Starr-esque drum part is indeed the right answer.
It's also their first appearance on Wicked Guilty Pleasures, so......
That drum riff was absolutely intentional. This song was Phil Collins's attempt to write a catchy pop song a la The Beatles.
If you have been reading this blog for a while, you probably expected a Charli XCX song to be the 1000th post. Long-time readers of this blog will recall that I used to post about Charlotte Aitchison more than I even post about Béatrice Martin now. That MAY be the only time those two artists will ever be mentioned in the same sentence. Trust me. I Googled that.
Anyway, this isn't the 1000th post. It's number nine hundred and ninety nine.
In 2013, I thought Charli was ahead of her time. Her 2013 album True Romance was a revelation - at the time, I said, and I quote, " Every single song can stand alone - and several have as singles - but the sum of all the parts - a dark pop gem that teeters between love and heartbreak - is so much greater." Its follow-up Sucker was solid. Of course, there was also "Fancy".... you know, the post where I admitted I had a Charli XCX problem.
Then came Vroom Vroom. The post I did about this song on September 1st, 2016 is the last time I posted about Charli XCX. I had misgivings about the song but spun it positive. Still, I found this period to be a step in a direction in which I wasn't interested - her subsequent single just didn't interest me. So, I turned my back on this music, and, frankly, her catalog.
I even unfollowed her on Instagram.
In the ensuing years, she has released a couple of albums and mixtapes. She's taken a stronger electronic direction, and a lot of it is really good. I largely ignored her late 2017 mixtape Pop 2, and that was a huge mistake, because that represents her best work since True Romance.
Apparently, though, I'm not the only one who missed Pop 2, because this video, released in April 2021, is for a song from that mixtape that has found a new life on TikTok. It would appear that the world has finally caught up to this artist ahead of her time.
I'm not going to show you the countless TikTok videos that are set to this song. I AM going to share a performance of the song, featuring Kim Petras, from 2019. I have always had respect for the fact that Charli performs her songs live, and doesn't rely on a helper track for all her vocals. Not every artist does that.
So I was minding my own business the other day. You know, doing normal Internet stuff before I headed off to work. Check Facebook, read a couple comics, update my fantasy baseball teams and lastly check Twitter. Big mistake (on the last one).
"Kinda want to bring @sneezeguard back to #WickedGP for a day so I don't have to write a @taylorswift13 post...." - Anthony D'Orazio @RedArgyle
Really? Called out on Twitter. I thought about it though and said, "maybe?" Sure I haven't done a Wicked Guilty Pleasures or Totally Covered post in like seven or eight years but it's just like riding a horse with three legs. Right? (By the way I left the kooshie blog world to run a Country Music website and then moved on to an outlaw country site where I seemed to only talk about metal or alternative bands, before settling in to "semi-retirement" after a stroke...seriously).
Could I spend an hour a week barely talking about specific songs while using the occasional clever reference? I don't know. Maybe...
So here we are...coming back stronger than a 90's trend.
In 2013, I wrote a post about a song, by a pop duo called Karmin. It was I believe the 4th post about them on this blog - there were another bunch on Totally Covered. Without actually counting, I think this might be the most I've posted about any single artist thus far.
The duo was a real-life engaged couple, Amy Heidemann and Nick Noonan.
In 2014, Karmin fired their record label - who weren't promoting them -and began releasing music on their own.
Fast forward to 2017. At this point, the music had changed, and Karmin morphed into Qveen Herby, with the now-married couple both involved BUT with Nick behind the scenes and Amy billed as a solo act. They - she - proceeded to release a ridiculous number of EPs.
The debut Qveen Herby full-length album, A Woman, was released in May 2021. I'm happy to be able to share a pretty great single from that album.
On this blog, we've had three Hall of Fame inductees - Nirvana, P!nk, and the first, Katy Perry. When we inducted Katy Perry, she had only TWO albums released.
TWO.
We had so much material JUST from what she had released thus far, we left stuff OUT.
This song, from her landmark 2nd album Teenage Dream (this version technically from Teenage Dream; The Complete Confection 2012 reissue), was one of those outtakes. This, the fourth single from that album, was also her 5th #1 hit in the US, and the 4th from that album, making it (at the time) only the 7th album to achieve that milestone - it would go on to produce a 5th #1 single, only the second album to ever achieve that (Michael Jackson's Bad being the first). (The Complete Confection would spawn a 6th #1, by the way)
So, on the strength of two albums, Katy Perry was a Hall of Famer in our eyes. History has already been kind to both Katy Perry and to Teenage Dream. And this collaboration with Kanye West is quite interesting and a bit of a departure from the rest of the album, taking a harsher edge tone.
Katy still performs this song live - but this is one of the FIRST times she ever did.
