The Michelob promo “Don’t You Know What the Night Can Do” followed it into the top ten, and other than a couple of top twenties remembered by VH-1 die-hards and in which Steve showed white people how to sell Quaker Oats to a non-existent black audience, dat was dat (the “Holding On” video is particularly gruesome, a Hollywood idea of what Bryan Ferry called smokey nightclub situations in his own Hollywood fantasia “2 HB”). Winwood’s second #1, “Roll With It” was even bigger than his comeback “Higher Love” exactly two years earlier it marked the peak of Winwood’s ridiculous High Eighties commercial watermark. “Roll With It” perfected and, in a sense, ended this string of boomer moves. Glenn Frey enjoyed his last hit with “True Love” around the time Steve Winwood released Roll With It and its succession of ever more boring and useless singles. These reveries took the form of black and white videos. When white musicians in the late eighties thought about the black music they adored in their youth, they imagined themselves in those smokey clubs where those black musicians played for often shit money but in those fictional clubs the white musicians were the stars, dressed like they were going to the Kennedy Center Honors, and if the black musicians were on site they served the white stars. Songs beloved by colleagues and songs to which I’m supposed to genuflect will get my full hurricane-force winds, but it doesn’t mean that I won’t take shots at a jukebox hero overplayed when I was at a college bar drinking a cranberry vodka in a plastic thimble-sized cup. I promise my readers that my list will when possible eschew obvious selections. I don’t want to hate songs to do so would shake ever-sensitive follicles, and styling gel is expensive. Like a good single, a terrible one reveals itself with airplay and forbearance.
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