Laibach “Geburt Einer Nation” (the Queen cover)

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chippendale’s started in 1979, which is right in step with the village people/diana ross/ONJ muscle fetish.

If you can put up with a naked Rammstein insterspersed in the footage, there is some CRAZY beefcake in this video:

“Follow your dreams, you can reach your goals, i’m living proof. Beefcake. BEEFCAKE!”

What a fun most Mr. Matos!

the eight-year-old me, who heard this song a lot in her modern dance class, most certainly was.

Re: “So Many Men…” which was radio gold for Z100 New York back in the day (I recall they were still playing it in 1985 when my family moved out of NYC temporarily), as if the gay subtext wasn’t obvious enough, the station did a parody version sung in a lispy male voice. Clearly no one, even back then, was unaware of the homoerotic subtext.

…which they weren’t, just a half-decade earlier, with the Village People. I mean, maybe this is just my memories of the late ’70s talking (when I was, y’know, seven), but in the Italian-American nabe where I grew up, straight men unironically wore “Macho Man” T-shirts. Throw that data point into the pile with everything else the VP pulled over the heads of the American people, alongside the perennial grandma popularity of “Y.M.C.A.”

As for “Muscles,” I place that in the same category of post-Off the Wall, pre-Thriller hits that either Michael or Quincy Jones were involved in that sounded dated within a year or two — I’m thinking also of Donna Summer’s “Love Is in Control (Finger on the Trigger),” which has aged particularly badly. Honestly, these songs are so weak, it’s a wonder they made Thriller just months later.