Ten Pop Songs That Make Me Cringe: Title Hidden for Your Safety (#4)

Tweet

It's great to see that @Dena91 has joined the merry band of people counting down songs that make their stomachs churn. @JohnRoberts started the idea, and I followed his original theme of picking "classic rock" songs that "everybody" seems to love. This portion looks at pop songs, and there's still country music to come. (I know, most country songs make most people shudder. ). Here's the next song, one that's so bad I couldn't put its name in the title of the discussion. #4: You Light Up My Life - Debby Boone I don't have to say a single thing about this song and you're already going, "Yep. That blows chunks." You know what else blows chunks? The success of this song. It shared a "song of the year" Grammy with yesterday's song ("Evergreen"), and Debby Boone won "best new artist" for 1977. This was #1 for ten weeks, sold over five million copies, and won an Oscar (it was the title song to a lame movie that nobody saw). Yeah, '77 was a pretty bad year for popular music. Some things about this. First, just because you have a famous dad (Debby Boone is the daughter of Pat Boone) and a famous grandfather (country singer Red Foley....remember his name) doesn't mean you can sing. Part of the problem with this song is the delivery: Boone has a woeful voice. (Yeah, and Charles Foster Kane applauded his wife...didn't make her a good singer.) Then there's the religious aspect of the song. Somewhere along the line somebody developed the notion that if you sing about God the song has to be sappy. No. Listen to the Call (and you will, at the end of this discussion, to prove this point). Oh, and speaking of that, let's talk about the guy who wrote the song, Joseph Brooks. In 2009 he was charged with multiple counts of rape. He allegedly used his position as a movie producer (he produced the film that spawned this hunk of junk) to lure women to his home for "auditions," which on numerous accounts turned into sexual assaults. In 2011, awaiting trial on 91 counts related to the rapes, he killed himself by tying a bag over his head and running a tube from a helium tank into the bag. Sheesh, all he would have had to do was play this song. You Light Up My Life Written by Joseph Brooks Recorded by Debby Boone From You Light Up My Life, 1977 As I said, there's lots of great songs out there that proclaim faith in God without being syrupy. Here's the Call's great song of faith, "I Still Believe":