I am listening to the top 1000 singles of the 1970s (as determined by Billboard) on shuffle play on my mp3 player, and gradually weeding out the songs I don't want to hear anymore.
Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons, Swearin' to God
Frankie Valli was pretty good at adapting to the musical landscape (Bob Crewe, producer and frequent songwriter for Valli throughout his career, probably deserves some credit for that), and I admire his success, but this piece of funk lite makes me cringe. It's like Curtis Mayfield processed by Vegas. Valli doesn't pull out the falsetto on this one, as he would the next year on the huge hits that briefly made the Four Seasons big again, and the Seasons can barely be detected as backing vocalists on this one.
There's a twelve-inch extended remix. Even the album version is over ten minutes long. That's enough of that.
Murray Head with the Trinidad Singers, Superstar
Jesus Christ! I grew up liberal Catholic and am a fan of the musical; it's easy to mock, but was radical for the time, enough so that Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice couldn't get it staged until they recorded the album and it was a hit. ALW was only 21, and at the time his promise must have seemed immense. In retrospect, Rice's lyrics are sometimes clever, occasionally moving, and often dreadful. Doing elevated material in a colloquial voice requires a precise ear, but Rice often has no sense of the moments when deploying modern idiom is a bellyflop into bathos. There's nothing in this song as cringeworthy as "I couldn't cope, just couldn't cope" in "I Don't Know How to Love Him", but there are blurts like "Israel in 4 B.C. had no mass communication" and "Did you know your Messy death would be a record-breaker" and, well, the whole thing, really. "Could Mahomet move a mountain or was that just P.R.?" is schoolboy writing. "P.R.", we are hip, straightforward, irreverent, okay we get it. "What have you sacrificed?" is just there for the rhyme: the song is written from after Christ's death, implying a modern point of view at several points, and I think we all know what Christ sacrificed. The ear for phrasing in a melodic line is bad, too; for example, "You'd have managed better if you'd had it planned", in which "had" is given two syllables for no good reason, like writing a parody that doesn't scan.
For all that, it's catchy, and there are many better songs on the album. The power of the whole of it obviously worked well at the time.
Barry Manilow, Mandy
It's easy to forgive Manilow for "Mandy" at this point, since he famously didn't want to record it. Still: blaaaargh. I suppose wailing "and nothing is rhyming" and rhyming it with "climbing" is supposed to be a joke? Anyway, the seeds of Manilow's skill at bombastic arrangement, rivaled in modern pop music only by Jim Steinman, are evident here, as "Mandy" builds relentlessly to a huge cheesy climax. (It was a British hit a few years earlier, under its original name of "Brandy", for a songwriter named Scott English, and apparently it was originally a bubblegum pop song.)
Our (my sister's and my) sixth grade singing teacher, Mr Sheffield, mostly taught us popular songs from the pre-rock era -- what he liked, presumably -- and to this day I can sing "Hey Look Me Over" and "K-K-K-Katy" and "Goodnight Irene" and hear Mr Sheffield's ukulele -- I am not kidding -- accompaniment. Of course his students hated singing this stuff. As some kind of cruel sop to the students, he allowed each outgoing song to choose one song to be sung by the next year's class. The bastards in the year before us chose "Mandy".