Hey, what better way to start your week than with a big ol' slice of cheese? Never quite sure where the word came from, when I think about it. Some people love cheese (to eat), and some hate it, but then, you could say that of many foods. Cheese can sometimes make you wince a little, so maybe it's that? If anyone has any information on how we ended up associating cheese with overblown, overdone or over-sentimental music, perhaps they'd drop me a line and let me know?
At any rate, this week's selection comes from Berlin, and couldn't be cheesier. From a movie which, though it essentially made a young actor called Tom Cruise, and fuelled a new generation of gung-ho kids who thought they all could fly a fighter aircraft, and that it was the coolest thing in the world, is pretty laughable. The movie basically glorified air combat, and made everyone, not just military nerds and planespotters, suddenly aware of what the Grumman F-14 Tomcat looked like.
Take my breath away (Berlin) 1986
Yeah, strange coincidence that this single hit the charts the same year as last week's introductory “Cheese of the week”, Bon Jovi's “You give love a bad name”: guess '86 was a good year for cheese. Or bad, depending on what way you look at it. In fact, glancing at the charts for that year I can see at least a dozen singles in one month that could all qualify as best (or worst) quality Edam. What a year! But back to this selection.
So suddenly, everyone and their mother were an expert on US military aircraft, and war was just one big ol' video game, played for kicks. This was all bad enough, given that four years later these selfsame fighter jets would be streaking over the Arabian peninsula, paving the way for the Gulf War and the eventual emergence of George Bush's warmongering progeny. But politics aside, it's still a terrible song. Written by Giorgio Moroder and Tom Whitlock, it's a sappy love anthem which gave Berlin their only hit (number one on both sides of the Atlantic!) and also served to paint them as a soft-rock band, which they are not.
From the opening deep breathy synths to the tinkling digital piano to the ridiculously overblown video where Terri Nunn, lead singer with Berlin, stands atop an aircraft that, for some reason, is quite clearly
not an F-14, this song has cheese written all over it. Ask anyone about the band Berlin, this is all they'll be able to tell you in nine out of ten cases, but the album this came from was a whole lot better than this. Nunn's voice is beautifully soulful, certainly, and powerful as the jet fighter in the video, with certainly a lot more emotion in it than Cruise ever displayed in the movie, but I can't ever hear the opening chords of this song without inwardly cringing and just quickly turning the dial.