Bands like this frustrate me. I feel like non-music obsessives who consider themselves music fans eat up shit like this, just like the Grammys do. My brother is one of those people. And it’s hard to tell him why I don’t like them without sounding like a total snob, because the music is proficient, well-performed, and pleasant to listen to. Yet it’s not interesting in the slightest. I always end up saying something to the effect of “I respect it, but it’s not for me.”

Hi dear TNOCS:

I wasn’t sure about this, but here it is.
I give you:

BONUS BEAT: THE SPANISH VERSION

But first, some notes:
1. This write-up will only appear when the original artist(s) make his/her/their own version.
2. I’ll post this without knowing if Tom mention about this or not.
3. I’ll translate the lyrics (or I’ll try).
4. And I’ll give a brief opinion about what it may or not be lost in translation.

TODO MI AMOR ERES TÚ (ALL MY LOVE IS YOU)

Like a breeze
Your voice caresses me
And I ask for you

When it dawns, your love appears
And it makes me happy

You know me well
And you know, too
That nobody will love you like I do

You make me feel
Desire to live
Beside you forever
Your love is my luck.

Your voice calls me
You’re the one who wins in my heart
Because you have given me
Something sacred
With your passion

You know me well
And you know, too
That I can’t live without your love
And when you’re not here there isn’t happiness
My life is not a life if you’re gone

Chorus:
All my love is you
All my love is you
When you’re not here
There is nobody who gives me what you give
‘Cause all my love is you

Night of stars
Make her love me like I do

Early in the morning
Come, that is waiting
All my love

I’m young, I know
But I feel that
I love you and I only live for you

You know me well
And you know, too
That I can’t live without your love

Chorus repeats

We will change the world tomorrow
We will sing about what it was
And we’ll say “goodbye” to the sadness
It’s my life and I want to be with you.

Chorus repeats

I have to say that this version is the first that I heard, and for a long time didn’t know that it was a duet because they both sound too similar, I even remember that back in the day there was a sort of official video (or promo video?) that was a montage of MJ’s clips, but I couldn’t find in YouTube.

Michael’s pronunciation is really good, I don’t have any complain about it and the lyrics have basically the same idea, but said in other words. Ruben Blades made a good work with the translation.

A case?

From SICKO MODE to SICK COMMODE is my prediction.

September 26 was a watershed moment for the R&B charts, and it wasn’t because it was another instance of Whitney not being the R&B #1. No, it is the the first #1 for James Todd Smith, otherwise known as LL Cool J. And LL is hard as hell. Ladies Love Cool James had the first hip hop #1 on the R&B chart, and we’re 18 months away from the birth of the Rap Singles chart.

Radio was a big album, but Bigger and Deffer was bigger. Not as big as Run-DMC’s Raising Hell from 86 – that went triple Platinum and was #1 R&B/#3 pop album. Bigger and Deffer also went #1/#3, but only double Platinum. Raising Hell had My Adidas, Walk This Way, and It’s Tricky, but none of those got to #1 – Walk This Way also got to #4 pop and brought rap to the suburbs.

I Need Love is as close to an early rap ballad as you could get. It’s LL, a 808 and a Yamaha DX7 and that’s it. Here’s the video starring LL’s white Kangol bucket hat.

Mr Smith will return.

LL only was #1 for a week. For October 3rd, a future pop #1 was R&B #1.

Make sure you buy a virtual drink for our own jackunderscore in celebration of his first publication at the Other Site – big up!

LL does love LOVE.
most people don’t realize this…he’s been with the same woman since 1987. They’ve been married for 25 years and have 4 kids, 3 daughters and a son.

“I was just 19, something like that. It was Easter and I was driving down the block in my mother’s car,” he said, explaining that he had stopped the car to say hello to a friend.
“He said, ‘Hey, you wanna meet my cousin?’”, LL continued, admitting that at first he told his friend that he had somewhere else to go, but upon seeing Simone for the first time changed his mind. “I looked over and said ‘Oh yeah, I’ll meet your cousin.’”

And ICYMI… you can now browse TNOs archive by year. 😃

Let’s not equate Morgan Wallen being a drunk asshole to this kind of abuse, k?

Not that anyone could’ve known, but reading through this personal account makes me feel fucking disgusted in retrospect by all the different times this dude’s music was described as “sensual” or “romantic” in reviews. Nothing worth saving from the fire here.

Chart Hits on the Edge of Town
“Brilliant Disguise,” from Tunnel of Love, #5

One of the best quotes about Bruce Springsteen’s career comes from Steve Pond, writing about Tunnel of Love for Rolling Stone magazine: “A decade or so ago, Springsteen acquired a reputation for romanticizing his subject matter; on this album he doesn’t even romanticize romance.”

It’s true. Over the years, Springsteen’s characters had been driving in cars to some imagined paradise somewhere down the road. When the paradise comes crashing down among them, they get angry, sometimes bitter. Sometimes they make peace with things. Sometimes they revel in nostalgia. Springsteen translates the concept of the American Dream, both its essential grandness and its essential fallacy, into lyrics and music that feel epic, even when the stories are small. It’s the sweep of the story, the fact that you can trace the journey of the kids from Greasy Lake in “Spirit in the Night” all the way through to remembering those glory days in “No Surrender.”

Remembering those glory days had made Springsteen a megastar during most of the 1980s. The River came out in 1980, when his characters were still searching for a better life. The bleak and dire Nebraska managed to make it to #3 on the charts, despite being entirely acoustic and recorded in Springsteen’s kitchen on a four-track tape recorder. Born in the USA busted him beyond popular and into the stratosphere with folks like Madonna and Prince and Michael Jackson. If anyone needed more proof that Springsteen was a sustainable industry, the box set Live 1975-1985 went multiplatinum, becoming one of the rare multi-disc sets to hit #1 and stay there for a while.

How do you conclude a decade like that? How do you reckon with superstardom that you weren’t really prepared for? How do you look at yourself in the mirror and see a face staring back that millions are in love with, and no one really knows? For Springsteen, he married the model and actress Julianne Phillips, when there was a weird trend of rock stars marrying models. And then, when the Brucemania died down a little and he attempted to settle into married life, he thought about what he’d done. And then he made a record about it.

“Brilliant Disguise” was the lead single from Tunnel of Love, and it stands at the crux of the whole record – maybe of Springsteen’s entire career. Tunnel can be heard as a concept album of sorts: you start off with the bouncy, hyperbolic “Ain’t Got You” (which, in starting off completely a capella, offers a sort of quiet rebuke to the madness that was Bruce Springsteen in the 80s), before moving on to tentative steps into love with “Tougher Than the Rest” and “All That Heaven Will Allow.” “Spare Parts” and “Walk Like a Man” look at starkly different takes on parenthood, while the next two songs (discussed in a later column) start to directly confront the idea of the complexities of people in love.

Then comes “Brilliant Disguise,” a song about being on the precipice of love and fear. That first line – “I hold you in my arms / as the band plays” – is classic romance, only to be immediately undercut by the followup: “what are those words whispered, baby / as you turn away?” There are a lot of questions in this song, and none of them seem to have answers. In the first two verses, the chorus ends with slightly altered lyrics: “tell me what I see / when I look in your eyes / is that you, baby / or just a brilliant disguise?” changes to start with “tell me who I see.” In the space of a verse, our narrator goes from questioning motives and secrets to questioning the very nature of this person he’s with. That’s hard, and powerful, and raw.

Maybe you can dismiss the early questions as paranoia. Our narrator wonders if this person he’s married might be cheating on him; he’s hearing voices calling her name, and he believes – rightly or wrongly – that she’s going to them. So much of this could be boilerplate stuff, but Springsteen brings such specificity and idiosyncrasy to things that it’s anything but. He’s singing “I saw you last night out on the edge of town” because, based on who this guy was in 1978, he knows why people head to the darkness out there. “I want to read your mind and know just what I’ve got in this new thing I’ve found.” There’s such a lack of trust here, an underlying inability to commit to someone without full reassurance that they are exactly who you think they are (or, even more damningly, who you want them to be).

There’s also some hint of imposter syndrome, of not being good enough for what’s happening. “I’ve tried so hard baby / but I just can’t see / what a woman like you / is doing with me.” Well of course she’s cheating on him. He’s nothing. She’s way too good for him. Right? RIGHT?

Where things really change is in the bridge, where the focus shifts and you realize that it’s not about the other person, not really. “Look at me baby, struggling to do everything right / but then it all falls apart, and out go the lights.” And here we start cracking through the veneer of jealousy and confusion; here we find self-loathing, and guilt, and dark introspection. “Is it you I don’t trust?” is his last stab at accusation, right before the admission: “’Cause I damn sure don’t trust myself.”

That last verse is a lot less paranoid and lot bleaker; once he’s decided to pin all this on himself, he’s unburdening everything. He likens both of them to actors onstage: “You play the loving woman / I play the faithful man.” So there’s the infidelity; he’s been accusing her of all the stuff he hates about himself. One of the most resonant parts of the song is when Springsteen brings up the concept of the mystic: “the gypsy swore our future was right.” It evokes memories of a much younger Springsteen in the song “Sandy,” singing about the fortune teller Madame Marie. But the mystic immediately becomes prosaic and cynical: “but come the wee wee hours, maybe baby, the gypsy lied.”

The final chorus twists the lyrics a hundred and eighty degrees: “So when you look at me / you better look hard and look twice / is that me, baby / or just a brilliant disguise?” I have some idea of what I am, and it’s terrible. Can you see that deeply into me? (I also just love the hell out of this phrasing. Inviting her to really examine him for what he is, and being unable to find it.)

That coda rocks me hard: “Tonight our bed is cold / I’m lost in the darkness of our love / God have mercy on the man / who doubts what he’s sure of.” Sometimes I think the song is over, and it’s not. In so many of his past songs, love is the only thing getting Springsteen and his characters through. Here, love itself is the darkness. This is some powerful stuff.
I read somewhere that the positive reaction to the Tunnel of Love singles was mostly down to residual Brucemania. I don’t know if I agree with that, entirely. Certainly, “Brilliant Disguise” is a different sort of song than, say, “Born in the USA,” but in 1987, it’s not like quiet love/anti-love songs weren’t doing well on the radio. Though it comes from a different place and presented in a different way, “Brilliant Disguise” could be seen as a spiritual sequel to “I’m Goin’ Down,” which had been a top 10 hit fairly recently. (I mean, if we’re really thinking about it, “Hungry Heart” was about a guy leaving his family, and “Fade Away” was about someone leaving him. Springsteen’s track record with love songs hasn’t exactly been rosy.)

Personally: this is my #1 favorite song of all time. I nearly ponied up $1000 so that Tom would write a review of it. Springsteen came into my life when I was living on my own for the first time and in a relationship I didn’t understand. While this song didn’t help me get why I was dating someone 30 years my senior, it helped me realize that we weren’t ever really going to be that close. I kind of just wish it hadn’t taken me five years to figure it out totally.
We all keep secrets. We all have hidden lives. And maybe it’s never really possible to fully know another person’s heart. Those are hardcore thoughts, and Bruce Springsteen had enough presence, smarts, and charisma to package those thoughts into a top 10 single. A+ work. 10/10

He should punch his own fat face for saying something so ridiculous.

Y’all are out here tweeting all the winners. I would assume for people who want to watch the ceremony they’d rather have the choice to be surprised?

Sure, all men are pigs. Whatever

I take it this is about Freddie Gibbs sampling Farrakhan… 6 YEARS AGO? Why don’t you actually quote that sample from “Extradite”? You won’t, because it’s taken from a powerful speech about Blacks being murdered, still relevant today. People are smart enough to take what messages to accept and what messages to reject from an intellectual. But I guess you want to decide what everyone should hear. This is cancellation opportunism at its finest–hold back an obscure point for a long time and then drop it when they think it will make its biggest impact. Says more about the canceller than than cancellee.

Wow this is poorly written

“HEY MAN, WE’RE GETTING PSYCHEDELIC TONIGHT!”

fucking love it