19/08/2017

'Total Eclipse of the Heart'

And I didn't even feel like sharing anything today... Too tired by everything. But messages come from whatever source they are hidden in :)

I post this article because if I say this, a lot of people might not listen because of my soft voice. I post it because if I write it, a lot of people might turn a blind eye at an unfamous name.

So here is The New Yorker writing it. Thanks to lady Amanda Petrusich.

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Culture Desk

“Total Eclipse of the Heart” Will Never Be Eclipsed

By Amanda Petrusich

August 17, 2017

It feels like time-tested American wisdom to presume that, if some extraordinary event is underfoot, a cruise ship shall soon sail in its honor. The Oasis of the Seas departs Port Canaveral, near Orlando, on Sunday morning, for a seven-night “Total Eclipse Cruise.” Its operator, Royal Caribbean, has promised guests “extraordinary partial views” of the solar eclipse, and the chance to behold and admire, en masse, “the celestial phenomenon that is poised to become the most photographed, most shared and most Tweeted event in human history.” There will be “enrichment lectures”; bartenders will shake up a custom libation called the “Cosmic Cosmo” and ladle out little cups of “Planetary Punch.” And, in a true victory for literalism, the sixty-six-year-old Welsh singer Bonnie Tyler will perform “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” backed by the electro-pop band DNCE, while the moon briefly drifts between our planet and its sun.

Anyone who has flicked on an FM radio or stumbled into a karaoke parlor in the last thirty-four years surely knows at least a few bars of “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” a booming, volcanic pop song that topped the Billboard chart in 1983; at its peak, it sold around sixty thousand copies a day. The song was written and produced by Jim Steinman, the composer of Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell,” who later told People that he hadn’t anticipated its popularity, in part because of how he understood its scope: “It was an aria to me, a Wagnerian-like onslaught of sound and emotion.”

I don’t know that a person enjoys “Total Eclipse of the Heart” so much as submits to it. If you’re wondering what the song is about—the particular story it tells—I can’t help you. It communicates only great anguish over some unspecified loss: “Once upon a time there was light in my life, but now there’s only love in the dark,” Tyler gasps. You might be thinking that love in the dark doesn’t sound so bad. Yet to hear Tyler sing it—and her voice is capacious, emotive, truly unwavering in its sincerity—is to recognize that something good has collapsed. Perhaps Steinman’s narrative is purposefully nonsensical, an homage to the ways in which we gabble and rant when deeply wounded. Tyler, like Meat Loaf, seems to instinctively understand that the best way to animate a Steinman song is to sing it like a crazy person—red-faced, flinging your arms every which way, single-handedly sucking each molecule of oxygen from the room. To perform it properly means that by the time a singer gets to the end—to that final, shredding “I really need you tonight!”—she should be in a state of complete psychic collapse. Her audience should understand on a cellular level that she is not fucking around. In this way, “Total Eclipse of the Heart” offers a gift of release.

Time reported that, following the last solar eclipse, in March, 2016, the streaming service Spotify clocked a seventy-five-per-cent increase in plays of “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” The song’s video is appropriately terrifying—about three and a half minutes in, a choir emerges from the darkness, wearing white robes, with glowing green orbs where their eyeballs should be, and then, apropos of nothing, one of them shoots into the air (!). Vevo’s post of the music video on YouTube presently has over three hundred million views, a number that will almost certainly rise on Monday afternoon.

The astrologer Susan Miller, in an online manual titled “All About Eclipses: A Guide for Coping with Them,” suggests that an eclipse is one of the “most dramatic tools that the universe uses to get us to pay attention to areas in our life that need to change. They uproot us, surprise us, and get us moving.” It is hard to imagine a more germane soundtrack to emotional upheaval than “Total Eclipse of the Heart”—it’s the song we reach for when we have grown tired of exhibiting graceful restraint. Perhaps Tyler’s performance of it—at sea, under an obscured sun, encircled by well-fed cruisers in safety glasses—will unlock something in the heavens, and allow for a new day on Earth.

Amanda Petrusich is a contributing writer for newyorker.com, and the author of “Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78rpm Records.”

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The song, of course: