FOREIGNER – "I Want To Know What Love Is"

This is a tough one to rate. I initially hated it, then came around after reading (I think) Dave Marsh’s boost of it in his “1001 Singles” book, ca. 1989. Then I hated it again, then enjoyed it again. Hard to say. But at the core of it, it’s really about Lou Gramm’s vocal, which is wonderful and, somehow, is even slightly restrained in the midst of the imposed grandeur. Gramm really was an underrated singer, one of the best of the ’80s, IMO. The song on paper is pure schlock, pretty much, but the record’s redeemed by something one can’t quite pin down–Gramm’s vocal, or the slightly inaccessible emotions the song generated in its listeners. And U2 totally ripped this off–in sentiment, if not in song–with “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” (even the idea of the “spiritual black choir” became a ridiculous cliche after this, didn’t it?). Hell, I’ll give it a 7.

I don’t hear a will-to-gigantism here. I hear it roughly along the terms with which the video presents the song: at first Lou Gramm is solo, isolated, dejected (AOR rarely gets as dejected as this); his spirit is lifted once he joins New Yorkers from all walks of life in purposive, communal activity where Lou plays only a part–it’s then and only then that he gets the girl, only then can he even begun to understand what love is.

Yeah, I gave it a 10.

“Holy shit,” quoth yr correspondent when this came up in my RSS feed. This was a UK #1? I don’t know why I was surprised — Foreigner is just as English as they are American — but they’re redolent of the US experience of the 80s that I remember: halfshirts and unironic mullets and strip malls crisping in the sun. It’s rare, in other words, that the experience of the avg British listener as represented by Popular has coincided so nearly with not my own experience exactly, but what I recognize as belonging to my American peers in the 1980s.

Of course, being American, I think of the impact of British music on the landscape of American pop, and rarely think of the reverse effect. (And a bit of nationocentrism is implied in the very fact that I think of Foreigner as American. There’s something in there too about how, as we’ve seen Americans instictively code British as gay, so that the masculinized pomp-rock (although that’s problematic too, thinking of the high notes and ballad format) of Foreigner is claimed as American.)

Anyway, I’m overthinking my response to it because I’ve got nothing to say about the song. It’s one of those things I’ve heard a lot and has never meant anything to me except as a period signifier.

What made “Waiting For A Girl Like You” almost unique among Anglo-American AoR ballads was its hallucinatory background, the song’s yearning, wandering like the singer’s dazed uncertainty between keys major and minor, echoed by the alien high drones of treated guitar and synthesiser suggesting that Fripp and Eno had gatecrashed the session (Foreigner’s keyboardist Ian McDonald was an early member of King Crimson, so the comparison is not far-fetched).

“I Want To Know What Love Is” aims for a wider statement of the same basic theme – love found after repeated rejection and pain, and the singer’s resultant confusion – but its canvas is broader and coarser. While there are minute traces of Trevor Horn’s pre-production work to be glimpsed – for example, the sudden zoom-in on the synth chorale halfway through the first verse – and although Lou Gramm gives a fine vocal performance (he always reminds me of a slightly more rockist Cliff Richard) the lyric’s climb-ev’ry-mountain metaphor is shop soiled and the whole track sinks into regrettable bombast with the entrance of an entirely unnecessary mass choir, including among its curious number Jennifer Holliday and the Thompson Twins. It foresees with some shivering accuracy the post-Band Aid trend for Big Statements sung by Lots Of Voices with Proper Passion.

I remember being utterly baffled when I came across Greil Marcus raving about the sax break in this somewhere. I find this track inextricably linked up in 80s memory with Jonathan King’s No Limits, where the witless Tony Baker and Jenny Powell would troll around Doncaster and Runcorn to the cognitively dissonant soundtrack of Foreigner, Huey Lewis and Bruce Hornsby. I’m sure Robin Carmody has already written a thesis on the subject. “We hate all American AOR pensioners” as Frankie said.

I should probably provide a link for that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsIfJNOzWAo

I doubt it’ll be bothering Popular, and I have no opinion on the original, but Mariah does exactly the kind of excellent job you’d expect of her covering a huge wind machine song like this – the entrance of the gospel choir is gloriously inevitable. As a “lead single” it’s a tad desperate in the face of “Obsessed” flopping, this is the kind of awesomely overblown thing which Mariah should save to be an album track.

Are we ever going to hear this new Mariah album?

“NEEDS” to go back into the studio is rather ominous.

Ah, what I find interesting about this is that it has become, for me, a bona fide guilty pleasure, in that I’ve really started to enjoy it as I’ve grown up, but only for the bombast, certainly not for the emotion. It sounds like Zeus is singing, not a mere man! I generally can only listen to it on headphones, probably because I don’t wan’t any passer-by to think that I’m emphatising with it.

Spool back to January 1985, and whenever this comes up on Top Of The Pops or Radio 1 it makes my parents laugh.

Gramm: IN MY LIIIIIFE! THERE’S BEEN HEEAAARTACHE AND PAAAIN!

Michael Smart: Oh dear. He sounds troubled. Has he sought counselling?

I generally think that loneliness and seeking another should sound a bit more vulnerable and humble than this.

There is something pleasurable in assuming there might be some autotune in the Mariah version, and her almost singing like there is, but she does have the chops to sing it. The rest is as expected!

My sister I think possible bought every number one in a long run around here (perhaps skipping diamond) as she would have been fourteen and was working in a bakers, and wanted to flash the cash. We fought a tiny battle over this one because of its bombast she believed that it needed to be played at top volume. I on the other hand liked its gentle contained intro which I preferred to be played quietly (as I sang along). Needless to say she won and was right, at eleven I couldn’t really sell the line “In my life, there’s been heartache and pain”. These days I nail it at karaoke. 7.

It was always a pity that I Can’T Fight This Feeling, by REO Speedwagon, this songs spiritual brother, never went to number one. Firstly because it is ace and has a really dumb metaphor that confuses boats and ships. But secondly because I would pay to see a fight between the aging REO Speedwagon, and the younger but one assumes less hard The Feeling.

#24 the slightly indistinct grey/whiteness of it makes me think of those nanotech demonstrations where a band logo is shown built out of 5 atoms or whatever.

Ooh, some fine posts here.

I wanna know what Mariah tackling I Should Have Known Better would sound like!

Re 26: Not only did Mick Jones hail from Portsmouth, he decamped to Paris and wrote a slew of great fuzzy ye-ye songs for Sylvie Vartan (check C’est un jour pour rester coucher) before ending up in NYC and writing Cold As Ice et cet. I’d like to think such worldliness meant he felt comfortable writing for the voice of Zeus.

Tom, the “stranger, stronger, icier single” is Waiting For A Girl Like You, isn’t it? The bombast of IWTKWLI is what spoils it for me (5 is about right) and neatly summarises the change from ’82 adventure to mid eighties vacuous largeness. Architecturally, this is a modest office block with Corinthian columns blu-tacked to the front door – and plenty of that went on in the mid eighties.

Re 3: The spiritual black choir, or at least black female b vox, had become a slightly embarrassing pop staple earlier in the decade for acts as ill-suited as Aztec Camera. Hence the opening line of The all’s The Classical in 1982: “Bring on the obligatory niggers”. Then the choir got bigger and bigger until it imploded, with a hilarious pompous splat, on Rattle And Hum.

Re 17: Street Thunder and Urgent, sadly, are two separate songs. Reminds me of seeing Alternative TV’s new single in the shops and wondering what How Much Longer You Bastard sounded like.

Re 28: That The Fall, rather than The All…

I think 5 is way too harsh! At least a 7 for me, which immediately goes up to 8 once it starts up on the Lucky Voice screen.

I’m really sorry about this, but although it’s earnest and sincere, and although the intro is warm and enveloping, and although it’s a fine vocal performance, somehow it just doesn’t move me. And there’s not a lot more I can say about it.

Number 2 Watch – a week each for its predecessor and successor, plus a week for Prince’s “1999”.

And it must have been during this run at number one that we had one of the all-time great lines from John Peel on TOTP: “That’s Russ Abbot with his cover of Joy Division’s “Atmosphere”…”

Steve @35, I was actually referring to how that big F looks on the picture sleeve: hanging in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.

The alien invasion scale mix-up is an old SF idea, certainly pre-Hitchhiker’s (which Adams was no doubt referencing in that joke).

@23: On the subject of Christian codings, I’ve mentioned before (during the reign of Bonnie Tyler) that I was at certain points in my life involved with church youth ministries. At one point I was assigned the task of updating a Christian symbolist skit written in the 1980s which suggested “I Want To Know What Love Is” as the soundtrack for a scene in which the teenage protagonist discovers the God-shaped hole in their life. That, we were certain, was far too old and corny a reference for millennial teens. I can’t for the life of me remember what we replaced it with; Natalie Imbruglia?

(No rights were ever paid.)

Foreigner were always a more interesting band than their AOR contemporaries (REO Speedwagon,Styx,Journey et al) probably because their main man Mick Jones (not Gramm) was an Englishman with a long track record in British rock. That made them always open to new influences and Thomas Dolby had made a telling contribution to their previous LP containing the aforementioned “Urgent”, a great track.

Personally I can’t stand Gramm’s balls-in-a-vice vocals (thankfully we won’t have to discuss Michael Bolton on here )so that mighty chorus coming in to drown him out is what makes this record for me.

As someone else mentioned Tom Bailey of the Thompson Twins is on the chorus here though you can’t tell and after a couple of recent near-misses this was his only contact with the number one spot. His year began with this,took in appearing with Madonna at Live Aid and ended with his band becoming ,along with (the to me ,more palatable) Blancmange, the first victims of the Great Cull we’ve alluded to in the Band Aid thread.

The TTs are I think the least-loved of all the early 80s bands which goes back to what happened in 1982. In 1981 the approx 7 -piece band were the press darlings and heirs apparent to Joy Division amongst the raincoat brigade. Then after a few non-hits Bailey sacked all the real musicians keeping two musically inept “percussionists” who happened to be respectively a woman and a black guy for image purposes and went for the pop dollar. Their former champions went ape particularly when they started having big hits and were only too pleased to jump on the grave when their fortunes nosedived at the end of 1985.

Apart from “Sister of Mercy” I didn’t like them much but compared to late 80s horrors such as Transvision Vamp or T’Pau they were gods!

Anto #39 – it’s ubiquitOUS by the way. Agree with some of your comments. Looking back over previous januarys you can see a pattern emerging whereby occasionaly a really big Xmas chart topper was followed by a bland or “novelty” record. My theory is that once xmas/new year euphoria is over, the next No.1 just happens to be the fortunate leader of the “also rans”. E.g january 1971,74,78,82 and a few others, I’m sure

This is of course a great song for the ‘replacing “love” with “lunch”‘ game.

Now, I’m a broad-minded sort of chap, with a range of musical tastes that could kindly be labelled “eclectic” – or perhaps more accurately “indiscriminate”. Although it’s generally said that one’s tastes fossilise with age, my experience has been quite the opposite, and this is something in which I take a certain measure of pride.

But despite all of that, I still CANNOT FUCKING STAND POWER BALLADS. Along with metal (whose craft I can at least grudgingly admire), this is my one remaining genre prejudice – and it’s a prejudice that is going to become increasingly problematic on Popular, as the dreariest, dirgiest, hammiest, most preposterous Power Ballads have a distressing habit of ALWAYS FUCKING GOING TO FUCKING NUMBER ONE, AARGH!

In the spirit of fairness, and mindful of the esteemed commenters above who have given it the full 10 points, I’ve delayed writing anything about “I Want To Know What Love Is” until I had a chance to listen again properly. Perhaps the scales would fall from my eyes, as the full majesty of this song was finally revealed unto me?

Nope. Sorry. It’s every bit as awful as I remember it. Actually, it’s worse. Lumbering, forced, and just plain silly… and that’s before the entrance of the dreaded gospel choir, always guaranteed to drag an already awful Power Ballad even lower.

The blinkers stay on, then. And they’ll doubtless be staying on for many, many more years to come.

Re January sales. I can’t see why legal downloads would have altered the picture as people are still too broke/overburdened by turkey fat and cocoa solids to pay for new music.

Great fact about UK Subs, Mike. I have a memory of the Frank & Walters’ After All being the lowest selling Top 10 hit ever, up to that point (Jan ’93). But I just checked everyhit and it says it got to 11. Maybe it was just the weakest sales week ever.

I wonder if Pilot were the first group to viciously cash in on slow January sales.