We would have called her ONJ now.But I think part of the appeal was what the name was all about, its possible royalty. No one wanted to waste a syllable.Olivia newTon–JohnJust to say that it might be crowned. The rest of her charm came from that classiness of hers. She wasn’t the Queen or the First Lady, but she ended up looking like…a lady. And it was something she could enjoy and a category she could smudge. So this was someone who recorded six country-flavoured albums and threw a pillow in her ear during her rock’s height, funk, disco and glam. And most of their singles topped what was once known as Billboard’s Easy Listening to Her chart. (So maybe she was the queen.)
By the end of the 1970s, however, she had figured out what “Lady” was all about, and spent 90% of the first Hollywood films disguised as such and as a princess. I’m here. Most of it is weird and has to do with sex and some kind of pure white people.Not for John Travolta himself, but for the duet “You’re the One That I Want” When Travolta (and Triple X’s bassline) closes out the film. The virgin Bobby Socks, played by Newton-John, now wears pumps and skin-tight black trousers. Her hair grew from Sandra Dee to Sophia Loren.
That transformation unlocked something new that catapulted her to the top of the pop Olympus. Vestal is her vamp. Four minutes of pop no two presentations of her songs are the same. Neither did the person who screened “Grease” dozens of times. The only thing that kept me, 5, 6, 10 years old, in mind was the knowledge that Olivia Newton-John would soon make it to her ONJ-turning-amusement-park part.
I didn’t learn much from Newton-John about sex. It’s just that its existence was there to be hinted at and winked at. Certainly her pelvis was pinned to Travolta’s pelvis near the end of “Grease,” but she was on an extra vehicle called the Shake. And yeah, she called that zany video “PhysicalAt Adnik’s gym rat-studded disco spa, she gleefully rocks arms with one of the spa’s fat clients as a tanned, fat-free man walks away holding hands. They are What she wanted, and what I wanted as a result.
Videos, Hits, Her Lip Syncspure gold”: I also wanted Olivia Newton-John. One of my parents must have known this because we had a copy of her 2nd Best LP from 1982 in our house.and what my parents know it wasn’t Listen, the only reason it was there is because of me. I wasn’t even seven years old yet. That album was more of a spread than any album I’d studied before, except for Stevie’s Wonder’s “Hotter Than July” (you can see his shoulder), and his second in a good album. is. The strongest drunkard. And this is Newton-John in sideways display, from head to thighs, with short hair and characteristically feathers. White knitted top, tight white pants and gold jewelry. Did she really have her back turned, or was she just shot to look like that?Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” gatefold (tiger cub, not dissimilar pose) is mesmerizing I had to wait a full two months to see it as erotic.
Newton-John reinvented himself at the dawn of the music video era. She knew the power of her art form. She won a Grammy Award for her 1982 video for her album “Olivia Her Physical”, which was “Lemonade” at the time, and inspired Golden Her Time. Net TV eventShe had no choice but to play around with the excesses. Her real thing was the limitation. She seemed to know what she was, as a vocalist, as a dancer, as an actor. and she luxuriated in them. There was nothing inherently subversive about her. Still, she was a cynic. For example, she was the person you least expected to put a fat man on a massage table, ride him like a mechanical bull, etc. Even when she was nervous because of Eros, she as was in the videotied upDressed in a red leather vest, her mouth seemed to be hungry for water — you were watching an angel chasing a dirty face.
That’s why she survived “Xanadu” — the 1980 musical Burp — and she’s the Greek muse of roller-skating, impervious to the absurdity around her. That’s why she came to embody her 1980s sophisticated fantasies of pleasure, painless, profit. Nothing stood in her way. No one disturbed her. Even that gatefold: she’s fully clothed! Skates and spandex were props and metaphors. And “Physical” remained her longest-running No. 1 song of the decade.
But at some point she stopped cheering us up. Well, we stopped allowing her. Madonna came along and she threatened to put her out of business.I asserted she was a parody of Newton-John’s flirtatious, hilarious, heaven-sent persona. That she is resolutely white while bordering on an abundance of black and Latin music.What does that mean average Not just getting dirty, but getting dirty and mixing some of that blackness and brownness? For example, “Like a Virgin” is Newton John-esque, but more brilliantly ironic, genuinely imaginatively lascivious. Newton-John’s hit machine was still running until her 1985, when she was already becoming a sort of innocent memory. I mean, she was never forgotten. She’s where pop music is heading back. Stacey Q and Kathy Dennis, Carly Rae Jepsen and Dua Lipaz. The one and only Kylie Minogue.
It’s not her body that makes me want to go back to Olivia Newton-John, it’s her songs. There is always more than I can remember. I wore them in sundresses and leotards. But boy, that voice could work for singlets too. She learned to bend the soprano to bark, ring, and squeak. 1978’s “Totally Hot” occasionally features Sea World’s typical sound. Still, the soulfulness flaw paid off in spirit.
She’s also perfected the amazing trick of layering. Instead of one of her suddenly, in the pre-chorus or chorus-chorus, lilting, undulating, iridescent, undulating, beeing myself,”Have You Never Been Mellow,” upon “a little more love,” upon “magicHer body was one, but on record she could be many. Its glorious blue sky sounds like an exclamation point like “Oh my Lord,” but it’s divine instead. I like “ONJ”.
