The goal of the Guilty Pleasure: Music Edition exercise is to review music once viewed as inane for some new level of worthiness we may have overlooked and are now able to appreciate. Yet even with an open mind and optimistic view, sometimes it's hard to understand why a certain artist enjoyed the level of the popularity they accomplished.
Two words: Christopher Cross.
As a singer/song writer from San Antonio, Texas, his vocal styling was limited at best, his lyrics were light-weight ("It's not that far to Never-Never Land"..?), and his song (over)-production seemed tailored to the early 80s "light-rock-less-talk" format. Man, did that ever work out nicely.
His debut album won him 5 Grammy Awards including Best New Artist and sold 5 million copies! After some success with singing the theme from the movie "Arthur" (written by Burt Bacharach ), it seemed Christopher Cross would suffer from what I call "Citizen Kane Syndrome", i.e. producing your masterpiece as your first work and never being able to repeat that kind of lightning-in-a-bottle success again.
Sure, "Sailing" is loaded with lots more schmaltzy-guilt, but "Ride Like The Wind" had all the dance band guitar players begging their band mates to cover the tune so they could take that solo at the end of the song.
Get busy with that air-guitar!
-KO
