{"id":1318,"date":"2018-09-09T06:04:42","date_gmt":"2018-09-09T14:04:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/?p=1318"},"modified":"2023-03-04T17:56:19","modified_gmt":"2023-03-05T01:56:19","slug":"frankie-say-relax","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/frankie-say-relax\/","title":{"rendered":"Frankie Say Relax"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In the liner notes to their 1984 debut album Welcome to the Pleasuredome<\/i>, Frankie Goes to Hollywood bassist Mark O\u2019Toole writes of the band\u2019s hit \u201cRelax,\u201d \u201c[W]hen it first came out we used to pretend it was about motivation, and really it was about shagging.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes, Mark. We know<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

No one at any point in history from the song\u2019s release to the present has ever been fuzzy about the meaning of \u201cRelax\u201d; motivational speeches, after all, rarely invoke the phrase \u201csuck to it.\u201d Lyrically, \u201cRelax\u201d is not subtle (\u201cshoot it in the right direction<\/i>\u201d); sonically, the track contains enough grunting and gushing to broadcast its intentions to those who don\u2019t understand spoken English. \u201cRelax\u201d is a spewing, spurting geyser of a song.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a fifth grader in 1985, I knew the \u201cmotivation\u201d explanation didn\u2019t hold water. I remember sitting on a bench in the gym with a classmate during volleyball practice, deep in conversation about \u201cRelax.\u201d My friend argued that the word \u201ccome,\u201d as in \u201cwhen you wanna come,\u201d was actually spelled \u201ccum\u201d when used to refer to ejaculation. I had my quiet doubts about this; Lady Chatterley\u2019s Lover<\/i>, which I\u2019d read earlier that year, featured many passages about orgasming, all of which used a more traditional spelling: c-o-m-e. I was too meek to contradict my classmate, and even in fifth grade I knew this was probably a weird hill to die on, so I nodded and agreed with her. As it turns out, we were both right. Those virile chaps in Frankie Goes to Hollywood could have been cumming or coming; it hardly matters.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

(I\u2019d like to be able to point to Lady Chatterley\u2019s Lover<\/i> as proof my tastes in dirty books skewed toward the highbrow in my formative years. They did not; I was an egalitarian devourer of smut. Someday I\u2019ll give you all an essay on Smut I Read Before I Turned Twelve, but today is not that day.)<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

My classmate wore a sleeveless pastel ESPRIT sweatshirt to volleyball practice that day, which has somehow burned itself into my memory. At that moment, ESPRIT was on the cusp of becoming an eighties fashion juggernaut, and this was my first exposure to it. Her sweatshirt featured the brand name printed in oversized letters: ESP on the front, with the -SPRIT wrapping around under her armpit and across her back. My brain resolved it as two words, ESP and SPIRIT; I assumed my classmate was proclaiming her allegiance to the paranormal realm, which seemed to make a certain amount of sense. In the mid-eighties, people wore their personal credos across their chests all the time. Wham! kicked this trend off in their 1984 \u201cWake Me Up Before You Go-Go<\/span><\/a>\u201d video, in which George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley wore baggy white t-shirts with \u201cCHOOSE LIFE\u201d printed on the front, while Frankie Goes to Hollywood followed on their heels with shirts that proclaimed \u201cFRANKIE SAY RELAX.\u201d Omnipresent throughout the eighties, the slogan later popped up as a punchline on a mid-nineties episode of\u00a0Friends<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"Ross<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The subject-verb agreement of \u201cFRANKIE SAY RELAX\u201d often sounds grammatically wonky to American ears, but it\u2019s correct: While American English generally treats band names that sound singular, like Frankie Goes To Hollywood, as singular, British English treats all band names as plural. In other words, Duran Duran is hungry like the wolf in the US, whereas Duran Duran are hungry like the wolf in the UK. Some opportunistic US-based online t-shirt sellers are currently doing what I can only hope is a sluggish business selling t-shirts that read \u201cFRANKIE SAYS RELAX.\u201d This, of course, is heresy and should not be tolerated.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"Frankie<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Point being, \u201cRelax\u201d was a ubiquitous song throughout the mid-eighties, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood was (or were, if you\u2019re in the UK) a global sensation. Frankie even had\u00a0its own Commodore 64 video game<\/span>, which is surely a benchmark of success.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"Ad<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Frankie frontman Holly Johnson, n\u00e9e William Johnson, took his stage name from trans actress and \u201cWalk on the Wild Side\u201d muse Holly Woodlawn. Throughout the eighties, I tended to confuse Holly Johnson with actress Lynn-Holly Johnson, best known for playing a blind ice skater in the 1978 sports-themed romance\u00a0Ice Castles<\/i>; muddying the waters still more is Holly Body, the porn star played by Melanie Griffith in Brian De Palma\u2019s\u00a0Body Double<\/i>,\u00a0which plays \u201cRelax\u201d in its entirety<\/span><\/a>\u00a0during the deliriously awesome porn-film-within-a-softcore-film sequence. Melanie Griffith is a national treasure,\u00a0Body Double<\/i>\u00a0is a tawdry hoot, and \u201cRelax\u201d is a pitch-perfect match for both.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"The<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Although\u2026 The oversexed shenanigans in Body Double<\/i> are all of the hetero variety, whereas \u201cRelax\u201d is a queer anthem. Johnson and Paul Rutherford, Frankie\u2019s backup singer, are both gay, and while \u201cRelax\u201d may be interpreted as an upbeat paean to sex in general, the song is specifically an enthusiastic celebration of gay sex, something the ad campaign for Welcome to the Pleasuredome<\/i> made clear.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"Frankie<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Much like the song itself, the ad campaign is not especially subtle.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shortly after its initial release in November 1983, so legend goes, the lyrics of \u201cRelax\u201d scandalized BBC Radio 1 DJ Mike Read enough to make him yank the stylus up from the turntable mid-song and balk at ever playing it again. \u201cRelax\u201d was subsequently banned from all outlets of the BBC, which refused to give airtime to either the song or the video. Controversy gave the song the usual scandal-driven shot in the arm, and it began a slow but lasting ascent up the charts, eventually reaching number one in the UK and most of Europe and hitting number ten on the Billboard<\/i> Hot 100 by March 1985.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Across the Atlantic, the song received plenty of radio play, though MTV, the killjoys, refused to air the exuberantly raunchy\u00a0Bernard Rose<\/span>-directed video. A safe-for-MTV alternate video was produced, which was directed by Godley & Creme, the pair behind\u00a0Duran Duran\u2019s decidedly unsafe-for-MTV video for \u201cGirls on Film<\/span><\/a>.\u201d The\u00a0Godley & Creme version\u00a0<\/span><\/a>features Johnson shimmying in front of a laser light show, presumably inspired by the part of the song where he snarls sexily about getting hit with laser beams.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"The<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

And then there\u2019s the raunchy original video, the one that made the networks recoil, which follows Johnson and Rutherford as they navigate the sordid waters of a hardcore leather club with pluck and aplomb. Boy George, who bore the mantle of pop music\u2019s scolding aunt throughout most of the eighties, wrote an open letter to the\u00a0Record Mirror<\/i>\u00a0wherein he proclaimed the video to be \u201cCheap, disgusting and very childish<\/span><\/a>.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"The<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

I mean\u2026 It\u2019s not an especially\u00a0tasteful<\/i>\u00a0video, but \u201cdisgusting\u201d is taking things a bit far. It\u2019s essentially a\u00a0Tom of Finland<\/span><\/a>\u00a0exhibit come to life; if you\u2019re cool with that concept, nothing in the video will give you pause. The video kicks off with Johnson meeting Rutherford outside a fetish club. Johnson arrives by rickshaw; Rutherford loiters by the entrance, looking like he\u2019s waiting to hear about callbacks to play the understudy for the Village People\u2019s leatherman.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"Frankie<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Inside the club, a corpulent man in a toga is carried on a dais to the balcony, where he oversees the action on the floor. Later, he\u2019ll whip off his clothes and spray the crowd below with exuberant bursts of\u2026 oh, who knows? Let\u2019s say it\u2019s champagne. In the video\u2019s most gripping subplot, a chained-up bartender with outstanding hair fights a losing battle to keep her leather corset in place.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"Frankie<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Meanwhile, Johnson loses a bar fight and gets forcibly dragged onto the stage to get ravaged by a tiger. He\u2019s cool with this.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"Frankie<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The video ends, inevitably, with a great deal of wild groping, tussling, and spilling of fluids; it\u2019s clear Johnson is having a blast. Thrust in the eye of all kinds of seamy behavior, he remains a strangely wholesome presence. Between his preppy attire and his cheery demeanor, he seems less like a dissolute reprobate and more like he\u2019s blowing off some steam after a long week at his dead-end nine-to-five office job. When Monday morning comes, his coworkers will ask about his weekend, and he\u2019ll regale them with blithe tales of gangbangs, golden showers, and semi-consensual erotic tussles with tigers, and they\u2019ll smile nervously before excusing themselves, a little sorry they asked. Johnson will, of course, be completely unruffled by their reaction; he\u2019ll saunter off to the break room for a handful of biscuits and a nice cup of tea before starting his day. Because Frankie say relax, and that\u2019s exactly what he plans to do.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the liner notes to their 1984 debut album Welcome to the Pleasuredome, Frankie Goes to Hollywood bassist Mark O\u2019Toole writes of the band\u2019s hit \u201cRelax,\u201d \u201c[W]hen it first […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1401,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-eighties"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1318"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1318\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1503,"href":"http:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1318\/revisions\/1503"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}