I love both versions. The later cover is hilarious and also kind of demonstrates what a killer song "Kiss" is, right down to the melody.
It also appears to be the first time we hear Prince on falsetto since his first significant hit, "I Wanna Be Your Lover."
Interesting point. Anything too strongly associated with the '70s - especially falsetto - had been verboten on the American pop charts since around 1981. "Kiss" might have actually been the first glimmering of a comeback of '70s tropes and genres. We'd be seeing more of these on the pop charts in the not-too-distant future, as a lot of counterculture figures - in the pop/rock, dance and R&B worlds - were beginning to experiment with this "forbidden" fruit.
as far as we are not talking movies i agree... both movies are bad, but i think the parade-movie (what was it called ?) is worse than "purple rain"
Well, George Michael too,always had a lot of Bee Gees (and later Prince) in his music, I think, as well as a good amount of falsetto, though not as much as "Kiss."
That came later though, didn't it? Maybe "Bad Boys", although that didn't do especially well here in America (#60). They didn't really break here until "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" topped our charts.
Well, I'm definitely not confining that statement to the American pop charts, which, well, I don't really care about! But no, I think that that most of the Fantastic album is VERY 70s, (Club Tropicana) and the Abba influence is all over Make It Big, which was a big hit even in the States. Even "Careless Whisper" has a pretty big whiff of 70s in it if you ask me.And certainly there was a lot of falsetto on the records, even if it was sparing on the actual singles (though, all over "Careless Whisper." That wordless but of "Everything She Wants" is probably the most Barry Gibb like vocal of 1984/1985! (though the backing track of that is pure eighties synth.) All of those records pre-date "Kiss." I'm just saying there were 70s elements in his music all along. From pretty much his second single. "I Want Your Sex II"(released a couple of months after Parade, I guess, on 12 inch) is practically Bee Gees pop/disco pastiche, but no more than "Club Tropicana" from 1983 had been. I'm not arguing with the general point that 70s sounds was out of fashion in the 80s --extremely so! -- but think that George Michael/Wham! had a pretty unabashed display of it in his music from the beginning.
I dunno. I didn't hear much '70s in Wham!, at least not at the time. Maybe in hindsight. Whereas the falsetto all over "Kiss" crawled straight out of 1979. Although Prince's electro-funk was so different - and so '80s - maybe we just didn't notice it at the time. A bunch of '70s retro stuff is coming, though.
I did. And it was definitely there. And the BeeGees-isms of "I Want Your Sex", mere weeks away from this hit, are clear and even more obvious on the 12 inch single.
"Tropicana" didn't chart in the US. It was actually pretty amazing how quickly Wham! went from nothing to everything in America.
No true if you are talking about other songs besides the #1s up to this point, there are: Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad Dirty Mind Uptown Partyup Controversy Let's Work Do Me Baby
I don't disagree with your assertion re: George Michael, just that America was super-resistant to anything that sounded "'70s" up until this point. Prince seemed to be the first to really break thru to #1 on the pop charts with a song that had a strong, unmistakable '70s element; that prominent falsetto. I'm sure this would have happened eventually anyhow - there were a slew of largely-unknown acts out there already mining retro sounds for their contemporary music - but I hadn't considered before that the massive success of "Kiss" might have encouraged labels to take more of a chance on promoting tunes like that. Essentially this might be the first big sign that - in the US anyhow - the pendulum was starting to swing back finally.
Time to let a new one rip: I Have Learned To Respect The Power Of Love - Stephanie Mills Week ending May 3, 1986 2 wks
