![]() Slinky synths dominate, but there are tootling saxophones in the mix, too. Instead, “Physical” fits into a sleek, pulsating early-’80s dance-pop mode. There’s no real genre name for what “Physical” is, which is a real indictment of that era’s music critics. Newton-John recorded “Physical” with John Farrar, her regular producer, who’d been smart enough to pivot away from the sonics of her ’70s soft-rock days, moving her toward an amorphous kind of dance-pop instead. ![]() Another Kipner co-write will show up in the column, too, but that won’t happen for a while.) Turner suggested the song to Newton-John, who hesitated but who also threw herself into the song. (Turner will eventually appear in this column. But they first offered it to Tina Turner, who thought it was too sexual for her. “Physical” came from the songwriters Steve Kipner and Terry Shaddick, who’d originally thought of it as a sleazily macho song for a male singer like Rod Stewart. That video recast “Physical” as a fitness anthem, but it kept all the innuendo intact. Meanwhile, Newton-John harnessed the full power of the music video, using “Physical” to tell a cartoonish story about doughy guys who magically turn into baby-oiled hunks in Newton-John’s fitness class. A few radio stations in Utah refused to play “Physical,” and that vague frisson of transgression probably helped lift the song’s profile. ![]() On “Physical,” Newton-John sang explicitly but playfully about sex: “I took you to an intimate restaurant, then to a suggestive movie/ There’s nothing left to talk about, unless it’s horizontally.” This was the most innocent sort of raunch. It was like Newton-John had watched how much people liked the movie, and she repeated all the same moves in her real public life. That evolution almost eerily mirrored the journey that Sandy, Newton-John’s character, went on in Grease. She’d already pulled off a wild public transition, moving from the drippy adult-contempo ballads of her early years and into horny dance-pop. With “Physical,” Olivia Newton-John created a perfect storm. It was about as big as a song can get, and in its slippery genre-free pulse, it helped establish a new era in blockbuster pop music. Before “Physical,” Olivia Newton-John had scored four #1 singles and starred in the biggest box-office hit of 1978, but “Physical” remains her defining commercial achievement. Years later, Billboard listed “Physical” as the best-selling single of the entire decade. The song’s 10-week run at #1 tied a record previously set four years earlier by Debby Boone’s “ You Light Up My Life.” “Physical” had most of its run at #1 in 1981, but Billboard still named it 1982’s #1 single. But through the magic of music video, Newton-John figured out how to transform it into a song about having sex and working out, and she turned it into a juggernaut. (Congress finally made anabolic steroids a controlled substance in 1990, which helped bring an end to the greasy-bodybuilding-fantasia era of popular culture.) “Physical” was a song about having sex, not working out. T, another column of human sinew, to crank up the spectacle levels.Īll of this is to say that Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical” was in the right place at the right time and that hit helped set the stage for a whole decade of fascination. By the time of the first Wrestlemania in 1985, McMahon had brought in the TV star Mr. ![]() That freaky fascination in human bodies extended outside movies, too, and into other realms.Ī young Vince McMahon took over his father’s regional wrestling promotion and transformed it into the global cultural behemoth known as the WWF by largely doing away with old pro-wrestling storytelling styles and betting instead on vascular maximalists like Hulk Hogan. Universe had surpassed Stallone and arguably become the biggest movie star in the world. Sylvester Stallone, already a star, got more juiced-up and became an even bigger box-office attraction. That aesthetic started to take over blockbuster movies with 1983’s Flashdance, a film that will prove important to this column. Gyms popped up across suburban strip-malls, the same way that discos had done in the late ’70s.Īlong the way, someone figured out that jacked-up muscles fit well with MTV-style cocaine-haze editing. A whole lot more aerobics videos followed. The Jane Fonda’s Workout video came out in 1982 and became the biggest-selling VHS tape of all time. People have always been into bodies, but sculpted, oiled-up musculature - and the work necessary to sculpt and maintain that musculature - became a pop-culture fixation during the Reagan years. In the ’80s, people got really into bodies. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. ![]()
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