Tuesday, June 09, 2009

Total Eclipse Of The Charts

This video has been circulating for a week or two, so if you haven't seen it before you are missing out. And if you have, it's worth watching again.



The whole Literal Version thing which started with the literal version of a-ha's "Take On Me" has become a full-fledged meme. And judging my the many bad ones it's harder to do right than it looks.

But then boodler and sometimes blogger bc turned me onto Hurra Torpedo, some Norwegian rockers that perform the song on household appliances.



And in one of those weird cases of synchronicity where things come in threes, I was listening to the Stuck In The Eighties podcast and they were counting down the worst songs of 1983. At number four they put Air Supply's "Making Love Out Of Nothing At All".

But what does that have to do with Bonnie Tyler?

According to Steve Spears (and I have confirmed it with my Billboard Top 40 Hits reference), that sappy Australian band was kept from the number one position by "Total Eclipse of the Heart" which held the top slot for four weeks. And both songs were written by the master of the over-orchestrated screamer, Jim Steinman. Meat Loaf's record company had passed on both of those songs and one went to the wimp-rock kings and the other to that raspy voiced diva of the 80s, Bonnie Tyler.

Now you know the rest of the story.

5 comments:

Cedar said...

I once commented to a friend that Total Eclipse of the Heart is the song that Meatloaf would record, were he a woman. Good to know why I was thinking that.

A Free Man said...

I used to love that song. Really love that first video!

Jeff and Charli Lee said...

The first one has very clever lyrics. It's just too bad the vocalist wasn't a bit more in tune... then it would have killed.

The Mistress of the Dark said...

I love that first one. I may have to put that in my silly video section of mossip this week.

Ed & Jeanne said...

These kind of videos are funny. My personal favorite is the literal version of CCR's "Have you ever seen the rain." Now that one is a work of hillarious art!