The Weird Behind the Music Moments That Have Taken Up Valuable Real Estate in My Brain and Will Never Leave
I suspect that future generations will know Behind the Music primarily for inspiring a controversial episode of The Simpsons. At its peak Behind the Music was huge and eminently mockable but it seems to have receded culturally in the past few decades despite recently being rebooted. Why was it rebooted? Because everything halfway popular or famous gets rebooted and Behind the Music has historically been both famous and popular.
Behind the Music was otherwise a victim of the internet. Now if you want to hear salacious gossip about famous musicians you have any number of sleazy websites to choose from. That makes Behind the Music less essential for audiences, artists and labels alike.
Being a fan of pop culture and music and mindlessly consuming television, I watched a lot of Behind the Music back in the day but my stupid obsessive brain fixates relentlessly on two specific moments that have penetrated my subconscious in a seemingly permanent way.
The first moment that stands out to me comes from the Culture Club episode of Behind the Music. That was a juicy one! That Boy George is a bit of a character. Incidentally I watched the first episode of The Joan Rivers Show on the Roku Channel a while back and was shocked by how random and half-assed it felt.
There was a segment on which breakfast cereals children enjoyed that literally consisted of some moppets eating Frosted Flakes and Sugar Smacks. The most attention-grabbing aspect of the first episode was an interview with Boy George.
Rivers cultivated an image as a professional hater who made a good living cracking cruel jokes at the expense of famous people. I’m sure Rivers made her share of Boy George jokes.
But the Joan Rivers who interviewed George that day was the farthest thing from an insult comic. Instead she was a good and loving friend who seemed genuinely worried about George and was very much invested in his health and happiness. Rivers wasn’t just a friend; she was Boy George’s concerned Jewish mother, a nice lady who wanted her surrogate progeny to eat right and stay off drugs and not associate with bad people.
It was sweet. It really was. You really got a sense of who Rivers was as a person in that moment.
My first standout Behind the Music moment, incidentally, has nothing to do with Joan Rivers.
Instead it focusses on Jon Moss, who was Culture Club’s drummer and Boy George’s lover and muse. From the defensive tone of his comments, I get the sense that Moss would very much like the world to forget that he had a same-sex relationship with Boy George.
Many of the songs George wrote were inspired by his relationship with Moss, including some of the band’s biggest hits.
Moss apparently found that perplexing and insulting rather than flattering. In the moment I will never forget a clearly annoyed Moss says that people claim that many of Culture Club’s songs are about him but how are you going to look at a lyric like, "Loving would be easy if your colors were like my dreams/Red, gold, and green, red, gold, and green” and say that it was specifically about his bandmate?
It is true that those lyrics are enigmatic and indirect. It would have been much harder to deny that Culture Club songs are about George’s relationship with Moss if he wrote lyrics like, “You were my drummer in the band Culture Club/We had a sexual relationship/though later you married and divorced a woman and had three children."”
Those lyrics would DEFINITELY be about Moss. So every time I hear “Karma Chameleon”, which is often, because it’s a big oldies favorite and hear the lyrics about colors and dreams I think about how those words are very specifically about Moss, whether he likes it or not.
My other standout Behind the Music moment also involves a homosexual relationship, albeit of the imaginary variety. It comes early in the Heart episode, when they were a hot new band but not a musical institution.
In it, one of the members of Heart, and I honestly don’t remember which, recalls being accosted by some creep who leeringly asked her, “How’s ya lova?”
First off, that is just a creepy fucking thing to say under any circumstance. It reminds me of the legendary moment in The Room when Tommy Wiseau asks Greg Sestero “How’s your sex life?
It gets creepier! The Heart member replied that that was a weird, rude question but that her boyfriend was doing just fine.
This prompted the unnamed degenerate to respond, “No, I mean your otha lova: ya sister.”
Needless to say, the musician was disgusted and confused and also not in an incestuous lesbian relationship with her sister and bandmate.
Now I can’t hear “All I Want to Do Is Make Love to You” or “Barracuda “ without thinking about some pervert in the 1970s asking a member of Heart about the hot sex life she supposedly enjoys with a close relation.
What random-ass pop culture nonsense are you obsessed with? What has penetrated your psyche for the long haul?
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