‘bette davis eyes’ through jaundiced eyes

[Y2kTheNewOldies]

https://radioinsight.com/ross/174500/bette-davis-eyes-through-jaundiced-eyes/

Here is a commentary on How Bette Davis Eyes became big in the 1980's.

Every now and then there’s a gold title that radio programmers don’t want to play, even if it tests playable (or far better than that) with listeners. Sometimes songs are challenged by arbitrary cutoffs (e.g., the PD’s logic that says, “’Margaritaville’ is from the ‘70s, and we don’t play the ‘70s anymore, but ‘Escape [The Pina Colada Song],’ while it’s from 1979, crossed into 1980 and is thus still okay.”) And then there are some songs that just seem beyond the pale to certain PDs. The audience hears Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping” as anthemic; for PDs, you might as well be asking them to play “Because I Got High” or any other novelty.

I have a lingering affection for “Bette Davis Eyes” as one of the bright spots of Spring/Summer ’81. Recently, I’ve had a surprising number of conversations with radio people who seem to consider it of a piece with the rest of the Christopher Cross/Air Supply docility of the era. It’s a surprising level of antipathy; at the time, I don’t remember it being blamed for much more than popularizing the use of “trash drums” in popular music.

As soft-rock artists of that era went, I already liked Kim Carnes. She’d already made cameo appearances on two of my favorite mid-charters of that era, Gene Cotton’s “You’re a Part of Me,” which she wrote and recorded solo first, and Randy Meisner’s “Deep in My Heart,” the up-tempo country rocker that sounds plodding now, but sounded great among the wimpy competition of fall 1980. (She had even given longtime friend/associate Kenny Rogers one of his okay moments.) Even if she’d stuck with the remakes that drove her previous project, I would have been interested in what she did next.