999,931: Barry Manilow — Could It Be Magic

Starting in the late 1960's, artists as diverse in their quality and popularity as Blood, Sweat & Tears, Wendy Carlos, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer used the "modernization" of classical music as a pop calling card. While arguably exposing the works of Bach and Mussorgsky to wider audiences, these re-imaginings were not always, um, tasteful. In the hands of Keith Emerson and his Brobdingnagian stacks of keyboard instruments, they were, in fact, tackier than jokes about leisure suits and The Hustle.

Which brings us to Barry Manilow. Given the man's deserved reputation for schmaltzy bombast (and undeserved reputation as a lazy musical punchline), it's something of a surprise that we must turn to him for perhaps the most "polite" use of a classical work in one of the day's charting singles. "Could It Be Magic" begins with Chopin's prelude in C minor, then uses that piece as a launchpad into an epic, lushly orchestrated soundscape that keeps building and building until it has nowhere else to go except...right back to Chopin's prelude in C minor.

While it's best to stay as far away from Manilow's lyrics as possible, I won't. They read like the half-legible scribbles you might find on a piece of notebook paper torn out of a sensitive high school freshman's binder while he was being mauled by the varsity lacrosse team—and your sympathies lie with the lacrosse team. The first lines, about a spirit "whirling like a cyclone in my mind" every time "sweet Melissa" draws near, merely make you cringe while yearning for the poetry of the Allman Brothers. The proceeding ones, describing Melissa as an angel who is the "answer to all answers I can find", make you wonder about the strength of Manilow's SAT vocab score.

Meanwhile the second verse, which begins, "Lady take me high upon a hillside/High up where the stallion meets the sun", leaves you convinced that Manilow has no idea what a stallion is, has never been on a hillside, does not understand where the sun might be located, and has not been introduced to a woman. Either that, or he bought the words off a badly-injured sensitive high school freshman. Luckily, Manilow pretty much runs out of lyrics at this point.

For the next three minutes and twenty seconds, he has nothing to sing but multiple repetitions of the chorus while the orchestration of Chopin's prelude takes on layer after layer of new voices and instruments. Like a slowed, regimented version of the crescendo at the end of "A Day in the Life", a succession of strings, choir vocals, woodwinds, percussion and finally brass instruments join in and grow ever louder, punctuated by stabbing vocals of "Could it be magic" and "Baby I want you". As the rhapsodic crush eventually drowns out Manilow and his vocal recedes, the effect is almost haunting. All the failures of the first two verses, with each bad metaphor diving headfirst off the hillside into the sun, have been erased by Manilow's overwhelming symphonic tour-de-force. The naked sentiments that fell so flat in verse—the ridiculous longing, the inept imagery—are powerfully communicated via music. Finally this cacophony diminishes also, like a tractor-trailer that's been overtaken on a highway, until nothing is left but, once again, the piano and the Chopin tune.

Could It Be Magic - Barry Mani...