Song 16:
"Addicted to Love” by Robert Palmer
Peak: 1
Year: 1986
Year end position: 10
Alphabetical Songs by Artist: 1/7
Chronological Songs by Artist: 3/7
Video?: Yes
Spotify?: Yes
It’s been 10 days
since we had our last #1 song. As of
today, there are 1,120 songs that have hit #1 that I plan on going over in this
blog. That’s an average of one ever y
7.17 songs, so we are a little ahead of that pace so far (3 #1 songs in 16 =
one every 5.33 songs). I particularly
like #1 songs because there is usually a lot more information to draw from
about them, and also more people are more familiar with them.
That is almost
certainly true about today’s song. This
song hit #1 in 1986, and was the 10th biggest song of the year,
despite only spending one week at #1. If
I had to ask people to name a Robert Palmer song, I’m pretty confident that
this is the song that most people would come up with. I think it is one of the iconic songs of the
1980s. It sums up a lot of things that
people remember about the 80s. The
singer is a well dressed man from England, and it had a memorable video
(despite the questionable production value).
I feel like
Robert Palmer had three distinct sections of his career. He had 7 top 20 hits spread out from 1978 to
1991, which makes his career comparable to acts like Jackson Browne, Eddie
Money and Frankie Valli (solo) as far as velocity of hits goes. His first two hits came in the late 70s. He then had a 7 year break from the charts
until this song in 1986, which started a run of three top 10 hits in a 3 year
period. Shortly after that, he had 2
more hits between 1988 and 1991. The
distinction between these three periods of activity that is interesting to me
is that the first and third sets of songs didn’t feature any songs that reached
higher than #14 on the charts. The
middle section featured a #1 song (this one), and 2 songs that peaked at
#2. It seems like his solo career arch
formed a nice bell shape curve: a brief run of tremendous success with moderate
hits before and after.
Some people will
point out his work with the super group: The Power Station, and that actually fits well in my
bell curve theory about Robert Palmer, but we will get to them later.
I was doing some
research on this song, and I learned that this song was originally supposed to
be a duet between Robert Palmer and none other than Chaka Khan. It is really hard for me to imagine this song
as a duet, but that is probably because I’m so used to hearing this song the
way it is now. It might have been pretty
good. I don’t think they ever recorded
it, so there’s not even a bootleg version available, but I would have loved to
have heard it. The reason it never came
about was because of a dispute with the record labels. Robert Palmer and Chaka Khan were on
different labels, and Chaka’s label wouldn’t give her permission to record on
another label, so the world was robbed of that version. I would argue that the version the world got
is pretty darn good, so suck it up World.
Yesterday’s song,
“Addicted”, was about how the singer was addicted to the sex he was having with
a particular woman. “Addicted to Love”
is a lot less specific. In this song,
Robert Palmer seems to be staging a musical intervention with the
listener. Unlike the previous song, he
spends virtually the whole song talking not about how he feels, but about the
conditions that the listener is going through.
They actually sound pretty bad.
Some of the adverse effects according to Robert Palmer are: body shakes,
insomnia, loss of appetite and heart palpitations. Despite all of those things, Robert thinks
that you can’t help yourself. The second
verse is pretty damning. After
describing all the bad things you are going through, he says, “Oblivion is all
you crave / If there’s some left for you / You Don’t mind if you do”. He also won’t tolerate you being in denial
about it. His only remedy for this
situation is for you to break down and admit that you are addicted. He repeats “You might as well face it” at
least 10 times at the end of the song.
Hopefully, at the end of the song, Robert gets you the help that he
desperately thinks you need.
I would terribly
remiss if I didn’t talk about the video for this song. Back in 1986, a music video could really
propel a song. I guess it still can now
(see “Gangnam Style” and “Harlem Shake”), but it seemed like there was much
more opportunity in the 1980s to make a big splash. This video certainly did. I can remember listening to the radio at this
time and the DJs at the time were wondering how they allowed it on TV. It was considered that risqué. Looking back
now, it seems somewhat tame. Robert
Palmer is standing in front of a group of similarly dressed and made up fashion
models that are supposedly his band.
Even a cursory viewing of the video shows that the models aren’t
actually playing their instruments. I
don’t think the drummer is ever on time, and some of the models are off beat as
they move back and forth. All of that
doesn’t matter. They are just there as
eye candy, and they are very affective at it.
There’s even one section of the song where there is a close up on one of
the models, and she seductively licks her lips.
Turns out this look wasn’t just random.
The women were supposed to be manifestations of the women in artist
Patrick Nagel’s paintings (think of the cover of the “Rio” album by Duran
Duran). He used the girls in every one
of his videos in that 3 song peak period of his. I’d like to think that the songs stood on
their own, but the correlation there certainly bears noticing.
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