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In the fourth season of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, cousins Will and Carlton begin university and they start sharing an apartment. Rich kid Carlton manages to get a date and he asks her to dance. The music being played is "Mr Lonely" by Bobby Vinton, which bemuses the statuesque Jackie. Carlton had already expressed a fondness for the likes of Tom Jones and Barry Manilow which is supposed to make everyone laugh that an African American would be so fond of such painfully white music. But being into the 'Polish Prince' makes him seem like even more of a square with tastes that are even more old-fashioned. (Significantly, it was during this same season that Will and Carlton pledged to a frat house only for the latter to memorably be rejected for "not being enough of a brother to be a brother")
The last first time he came up, I knocked Vinton for being all teen-idol looks and smooth vocals with little else to show for it. This still holds true but did he need anything else if he had the right material to work with? "Roses Are Red" suffered from being not a great song that he couldn't not get to rise above being horribly blane.; for its part, "Blue Velvet" isn't terribly brilliant either but a definite step up. Due to its use in this film of the same name, "Blue Velvet" is intrinsically linked to the Lynch picture. This has prompted Tom Breihan to wonder if it always had a dark side. "Could a song", he asks, "be Lynchian before David Lynch got a hold of it?" I think that is something that we can only claim in retrospect. Sure, it's dreamy and there's a touch of teenage angst about it but nothing to suggest a psychological thriller or whatever it is Lynch did as a part of his "oeuvre". Lynchian? I prefer Dinnerian.
The results can be best described as "a song". Not revolting by any stretch of the imagination but just another Vinton turn about heartbreak and feeling sorry for himself. There are certainly worse things in the world — some of which happened to also go to number one in Canada — but the idea of listening to something like this for pleasure just doesn't compute. And not just for pleasure but for pop music therapy: Vinton wallows in misery but offers little by way of guiding young fans along in order to find hope or a way out. It's musical junk food masquerading as protein-rich chana masala.
"Blue Velvet" is decent and the other two were just about tolerable. "L-O-N-E-L-Y", however, isn't close to as good as its predecessors. While Jackie might have humoured Carl by dancing with him to "Roses are Red" or "Mr. Lonely", she would have drawn a line at this stinker. For his part, Carlton would have had enough self-awareness not to try romancing a pretty undergrad to something so shitty. Similarly, directors ranging from David Lynch to Michael Dinner wouldn't have been caught dead using it to soundtrack one of their motion pictures. Finally, I'd go so far as to say it isn't a song at all, just a self-indulgent and pathetic diary entry set to elevator muzak. Not haunting, not romantic, not helpful to teens in any way; just an increasingly irrelevant thirty-year-old trying to keep the party going — and it's the sort of party in which everyone had already left or never bothered turning up for. Oh, and just because that's just my sort of party doesn't mean I've got to like it.
Score: 1
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Can Con
Yet he managed to have a respectable career; I'll have to see if he managed to live up to the early promise.
"Unless You Care" had been a promising start for Terry Black but "Little Liar" did a great job of killing off his momentum. It's fine musically but Black's voice had suddenly decided to immature with age. Somehow it still made the Top 10 on the RPM chart which probably owes more to his status as a teen idol than anything else. Plus, at least he still was a teenager in 1965 unlike the Polish Prince.
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