Who are you to deny Bonnie Tyler's importance as a cultural icon? Nobody, that's who. Just in the past year, we've had a profane version of "Total Eclipse of the Heart" (featured in last year's Old School) and Jennifer Saunders' cover of "Holding Out For a Hero" in Shrek 2 (it ain't Footloose, but it'll have to do). Personally, I can't tell you how relieved I was to learn she isn't dead.
She seems rather...well-preserved for 50 years and 15(!) albums (and by "well-preserved" I mean "surgically altered"). Her last CD was only released in France, and like Hasselhoff, she seems to be big in Germany. I can't be the only one who sees how easily this demonstrates her cross-cultural appeal. Perhaps if the Welsh-born Ms. Tyler had been around in 1940, we could've avoided a global conflagration.
I remember when "Total Eclipse of the Heart" was on infinite loop on MTV in the early '80s. The video was typical for its vintage, which is to say utterly nonsensical (I seem to recall horses, lots of shirtless guys, and a table being upended for no reason a la "Hungry Like the Wolf"). Dismissing the cultural significance of such a piece would be foolhardy, however. Those were heady times, when Cold War fears and the inability to Safety Dance could cause even the most level-headed of us to toss furniture around like the Tasmanian Devil. She offered us catharsis.
Could a Golden Age of Bonnie be forthcoming? Can her Jim Steinman-penned odes to heroes and solar-cardiac phenomena calm our troubled world? Will she tour with Quarterflash?
We can only hope.
'Total Eclipse of the Heart' was a classic junior high/high school slow dance song. did she swallow steel wool to get that voice, btw?
Um, no, that was the cocaine.
If either of you troglodytes had bothered to read the web page bio:
In 1976 Bonnie was forced to undergo surgery for nodules found on her throat. The operation was to have an enormous impact on her later career. Her voice became more huskier in register, similar to both Tina Turner and Kim Carnes, with whom she was frequently compared and the tag stuck "the female Rod Stewart".
So, yeah...cocaine.
Total Eclipse of the Heart is also a favorite of many strippers. It's a really really long song.
Actually, I think you're confounding it with "Holding Out for a Hero". That one had the horses and cowboys and Bonnie Tyler on a cliff somewhere. "Total Eclipse" had the big spooky house and the guys with glowing eyes.
Don't ask me how I remember this.