Oh, sure, we'll still make fun of those of you obsessed with imaginary fake football. But to show that it's all in good fun, we're offering you a pop-culture trip through fantasy history: a pick-six of the best Fantasy songs in the rock era.
Enjoy the tunes ... and your imaginary fake football season
with FFChamps.
OK, we admit it. This song sucks donkey nuggets. But you try digging up six songs with Fantasy in the title. It was
either this tune at No. 6, or
George Michael's version of "Fantasy." Even we couldn't do that to ya.
At least 1990s diva extraordinaire Mariah Carey is a little piece of ass and the video is quite enjoyable if you hit the mute button and stare at her cleavage and navel. The music trivia junkies among us, meanwhile, know that Carey's "Fantasy" samples a Euro-pop hit of the 1980s. And it's driving us f'in nuts that we can't figure out what it is. If you know,
shoot us a note.
(Hey, we got the answer: the sampled clip is from "Genius of Love" by the Tom Tom Club. Cap tip to reader Mongo Heathen for the answer. He/she/it describes themself as a "treasure trove of useless information" who "hates to admit" they know so much about Mariah Carey's song book. Sounds just like the kind of shut-in low-life basement dweller we attract here at CHFF.)
Disco, funk and soul had a baby, and they called it Earth Wind & Fire. These guys were right at the cutting edge of
the evolutionary musical period of the late 70s. The period ended with this kind of new poppy 80s sound, but one deeply rooted in disco and huge 'fros. This EW&F classic is a true musical chameleon. It sounds like it'd be right at home as the theme song to the Love Boat in 1977 or a theme song to your junior high prom in 1985.
We're not saying we like Earth, Wind & Fire. After all, they're only No. 5 on our list of Fantasy songs. We're just saying that we don't change the channel when "Fantasy" comes on the radio.
OK, we realize it's not cool to be an Idol fan. Call us not cool, be-atch. "
Rebel Yell" is one of the great rockers of the 1980s while "FFF," as it's known to William's fans, is one of the most openly raunchy songs of the decade, just a shade behind Prince's masturbatory classic, "Darling Nikki."
It's a dreamy, fantastical tale of forbidden sex: "It's after midnight; Are you feeling alright; Oh, yeah; Turn out the light babe; Are you someone else tonight?" That's some deep shit when you're a 15-year-old boy making out with your girlfriend when the little whore should be babysitting the neighbor's rug rats.
A classic rock, well, classic. It's straight out of the trippy, hippy drugged out phase of rock history. As you know, we hate the hippies. But we do love the hippy music. It was the greatest and most talent-filled period in rock history.
"Dear Mr. Fantasy" has a great blues-rock guitar hook and a kind of floating dreamscape back beat that lends the entire song a drugged-out, wandering, Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now-style tenor. The lyrics do, too.
As Steve Winwood croons to the magical musician Mr. Fantasy: "Please don't be sad; If it was a straight mind you had; We wouldn't have known you all these years."
O.K., we're kinda cheating here. Obviously the word "fantasy" does not appear in the title. But work with us, fellas.
This Def Leppard staple is a song about fantasy, and a classic smashing guitar-chords 1980s-style rocking song at that: the story about a "rock 'n roll clown" who falls in love with a model's photograph – you know, kind of how you fall in drunken love with the strippers at the Pleasure Dome in White Haven, PA as you happily turn over a fistful of 20s.
Admit it, douche bag: you play air guitar when you're cruising down the highway and this song comes on the radio, and then throw your devil's horns out the window when Joe Elliott croons, "You're all ... I want ... my fantasy!"
"Photograph" is a great fantasy song. But it's not the greatest 1980s song about a rocker who falls in love with a model's photograph. That honor goes to "
I'll Wait" by Van Halen, with "
Centerfold" by J. Geils a distant third.
Talk about the total 80s experience, encapsulated in a single video. Aldo Nova's Fantasy has more cheese in it than a Lambeau Field tailgate, from the leopard-skin suit to the dreadfully low-tech guitar used as a Star Wars-style particle blaster.
But the tune also features a screaming guitar lick, some rockin' 80s-style pop-metal and the suggestive lyrics that so tickled the fancy of teen boys circa 1984. "See the girls with the dresses so tight – giving love! – giving love if the price is right."
The video is filled with one fantastical sequence after another: Aldo Nova arriving at the show in a helicopter while his Quasimodo-twin roadie hands him the deadly, laser-shooting guitar that he uses to break into his own show. And then, in a real fantastical flourish at the end that stretches reality, groupies storm the stage to get a piece of Aldo Nova. As if.
That's good some good fantasy hooch, brother man.
