I Love Bad Music: Sweet (Legal) Love
HT Contributor Eliot Glazer has tremendously terrible taste in music. But he’s an adroit wordsmith, and he’s gonna try to convince us that the bad is really good.
Not until recently did I realize how much I love Anita Baker.
I don’t know what clued me in. I should have realized her brilliantly campy appeal years ago when, while working at a country club, a fellow employee (and unrecognized pop cultural genius) complained about George Michael’s Careless Whispers being played too often throughout the establishment. I questioned her disgust with the song, as I was personally indifferent to it.
“C’mon, dude,” she said, “It’s totally an anthem for pedophiles.”
Read on for more of Eliot’s hilarious romp through Anita Baker’s mind…
And that, I now understand, is what puts a smirk on my face each time I hear Anita Baker’s Sweet Love. My parents didn’t have Rapture when I was a kid (although they did have Giving You The Best That I Got, on whose album cover I insisted that Anita Baker was actually Jasmine Guy dressed up like the long-lost member of The Golden Girls), but Sweet Love is a tune to which everyone knows the words, whether you’ve witnessed a drunken secretary belt it out at karaoke or overheard it faintly over the sound of a drill bulldozing your molar.
But back to the pederasts. Watch the video for Sweet Love and imagine that the imagery of Anita Baker — a tiny, toothy black lady dressed like a missionary about to “hit the town” — dancing amid candles, smoke, and a baby grand (now we’re talking CLASS), is actually occurring within the mind of a repressed child molester at war with himself! It makes perfect sense! By 3:20, Anita Baker (who may actually be Peabo Bryson two octaves higher) is Losing. Her. Shit.
She’s shaking, and her formerly lilting vocal leaps have turned into moans of…ecstasy? Pain? Cramps? Even the horns sound horny.
The moral? Next time you hear Anita Baker’s Sweet Love begin to play while you browse the clearance aisle at TJ Maxx, hide your children or call Chris Hansen.
