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Don't Praise The Machine (DPTM)
Bonnie Tyler Is Gone. The Power Ballad Went First.
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Bonnie Tyler has died, and with her goes something bigger than one Welsh voice with a rasp.
Total Eclipse of the Heart is seven minutes of zero-irony emotional maximalism, the kind of song everyone on Earth knew without ever choosing to, and nobody makes anything like it anymore.
So this week Alex and John tear up the episode schedule to ask the big question: what actually killed the power ballad?
Along the way: Jim Steinman, the leather-gloved rock opera maximalist who wrote it for a Nosferatu vampire musical (really), the gloriously unhinged music video, the uncredited male vocalist you never knew was on the track, the 1995 Nikki French eurodance cover that fooled a generation, why hair metal bands were contractually obligated to get sentimental, and how irony, algorithms and the death of the school disco slow dance quietly murdered the most sincere genre pop music ever produced.
Turn around, bright eyes. This one's for Bonnie.
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