999,898: Murray Head — One Night in Bangkok

When it comes to the primacy of music vs. lyrics, I'm a music man. Sure, lyrics can certainly ad or detract from a song, but there's a reason that music is called music. And for the people I've talked to over the years who "only" care about the lyrics, well, poetry's down the hall. Oh Burn! Are we done?

No? Well at least I'm in the majority. Take this song, One Night In Bangkok, performed by Murray Head for the musical Chess. Here's a song with lyrics that don't make any sense, but was still a huge hit. Now I could try to prove my point with any song with vague indecipherable lyrics, There's no shortage of those, but lyric boosters will claim that "I just don't get" those songs or that the "lyrics are supposed to be evocative" or some shit like that. In the case of Bangkok, the lyrics make perfectly fine sense, provided you hear them in the context of an album that few people bought, for a musical that nobody went to see.

I was barely out of footie pajamas the first time I heard the song this song, so God know what I thought it was all about. I certainly didn't think it was about whoring around Bangkok while on a chess tournament. I seem to recall liking that the chorus because it sounded like Michael Jackson, and liking the way the funny man said "massage parlor." Lines such as "Time flies, doesn't seem a minute since the Tirolean spa had the chess boys in it", which refers to the previous act of the musical, I simply ignored and hopped on my bed to the moderately funky beat. Slack standards such as my own helped this song chart on both sides of the Atlantic.

This song answers the question, "Is rapping just talking in rhythm or is there more to it?" There's more to it. But the fact that the rhythmic talking on this song sounds nothing like rapping (It sounds more like a laid back Fred Schneider) probably saves the song from the awfulness that claimed too many wannabe raps back in the mid eighties. And even the halfway rappiness of the song pushed the lyrics even further to the side, since this song came out before white people thought you were even supposed to understand the lyrics to rap songs.