Flashdance

I need to get the rest of these Old Lady CDs out of the way so I can start listening to my own music again. I’ve never seen this movie. I assume it’s somewhere between Dirty Dancing and Rudy based on the literal two things I know it involves, which are 1) a female protagonist who wants to be a dancer so very badly 2) a steel mill, somehow? This is a Giorgio Moroder production, and he’s the only throughline on the record. He produces every track. I’m not a Moroderhead (Moroderator? Morodernist?), but he seems to be everywhere around this time period.

I have no idea how much of this album actually shows up in the movie, but given that one of the songs is called “Love Theme from Flashdance”, I’d assume that one’s gotta be in there. It’s pretty good, as an instrumental on a vocal album goes. There are two songs on the record that I do recognize. “Flashdance…What a Feeling”, with its Sega Genesis synths, tricks you into thinking it’s a sappy ballad with its intro before blossoming into a classically mid-tempo bop. Great chorus. Quintessentially 80s. The drums and synths keep it moving forward at a steady clip and Irene Cara holds her own against the metronomic machinery. There’s also the retro-FM classic “Maniac”. If you asked me to hum anything other than the choruses of either of these songs, I wouldn’t be able to, but I bet that if you heard just the first bars of the chorus, you’d be able to sing the whole thing. It’s a shame, because the verse and prechorus of “Maniac” do a great job of ratcheting up the harmonic tension before the cathartic release of the chorus. The guitar solo is the weakest part.

It’s mostly filler beyond those three. “Manhunt” is a blatant rehash of Moroder’s work with Blondie on “Call Me”, but it’s still a fun song. The guitar riff on “He’s a Dream” has gotta be lifted from something with Don Henley, but it’s still a fun song. Donna Summer sounds like she’s doing a bad Ric Ocasek impression on “Romeo”, the definite worst song on the record, but it’s still fun. The album has a killer first and last track though, so it kind of evens out? The packaging is aggressively “fine”. I’m having a difficult time figuring out a rating for this as a whole. It does pique my curiosity about the movie, and it does have some genuine bangers on it, but it has enough skips that I don’t really want to listen to it in full.

Flashdance is a good album, but I don’t like it.