Robert Palmer - "Addicted to Love"

Robert Palmer was the puppet master of the beautiful, drugged, stylish, vacant mannequins in his video for "Addicted to Love." The song is anonymous 80s meat. The video deliberately exaggerates a misogynistic aesthetic, complementing the droning guitars and drug-pun-rich lyrics. This vacuous fascist fashion is how Robert Palmer is remembered, if at all.

Speaking of remembrance, I was struck, upon Palmer's death in 2003, at how anticlimactic it was. I didn't expect his death to cause global mourning as with Frank Sinatra, George Harrison, Jerry Garcia, or even Warren Zevon, but I thought he might merit a bit more than this cursory, loveless obituary. No tears for a craven 80s schlockmeister, I concluded.

It was only recently that I learned that Robert Palmer once made an altogether different kind of music. His "Every Kinda People" was, I kid you not, a social lament and prayer as joyful, heartbreaking, and fully realized as anything on Marvin Gaye's near-perfect What's Going On. Set to reggae-tinged soft rock, the lyrics reached out with a pure heart for a better, multicultural future. It is a stunning achievement with not an ounce of fascism.

"Every Kinda People" makes "Addicted to Love" and Palmer's other 80s output ("Simply Irresistible" and more) all the more haunting. Failing to achieve what his youthful heart yearned for, he sold out to slick fascist tropes. He chose the road well trodden, and in cashing in, he ended up an unmourned footnote in music history.