The Infinite Ick of Joe Piscopo's "Kimberley" and Benny Mardones' "Into the Night"
I understand why people are wary of judging the entertainment of the past through the heightened sensitivities of the present. Yet, I also think it’s important to put everything into an appropriate historical context.
People didn’t just wake up yesterday and realize that a lot of the entertainment that was passively accepted in the past was, on a moral level, very, very wrong.
They knew that it was wrong. But they also knew that they could get away with it until they couldn’t anymore.
When Jive put out an album by Aaliyah, a fifteen-year-old child, produced by R. Kelly, a prolific pedophile, entitled Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number, they knew that shit was wrong.
But they got away with it. The song was a hit. The album was a hit. Aaliyah was a hit. The song and album made her a star.
On a similar note, when Stanley Donen inexplicably chose to end his career as a film director with 1985’s Blame it On Rio, a sex comedy about a middle-aged man who is unable to resist the feverish sexual advances of his friend’s 15-year-old daughter, he knew it was wrong. But they got away with it all the same.
This brings me to Joe Piscopo’s “Kimberley,” which I learned about through my friend Gena Radcliffe’s Substack blog Gena Radcliffe Watches Things, which I highly recommend.
The performance is a fascinating relic from a long-ago era when Joe Piscopo had the power and popularity to stop a comedy show cold so that he could perform a humiliatingly earnest love song to a woman he met when she was an eighteen-year-old babysitter.
He begins by saying that he would never perform a song like that on a national HBO special, where he would be the subject of intense scrutiny and universal mockery. However, since he was doing a smaller show, he felt it would be all right to change things up a little and perform a straight song with no jokes in it.
An early indication that things will not go well comes from Piscopo announcing that he’d written a love song about his fiance to deafening silence.
You’d think that people who paid money to see Joe Piscopo perform would be moved that he was so besotted by his new love that he felt the need to write and publicly perform a song for her despite being a steroid-addled funnyman and not a straightforward crooner.
It’s possible that they were mortified by the prospect of Piscopo singing. It’s also possible that they were familiar with the subject of the love song and the inconvenient, extremely relevant fact that they met when she was a teenager and he was a millionaire deep into his thirties.
Piscopo has a Jeb Bush “please clap” moment when he thirstily implores, “Are you with me on this? Can I do a song for you?” Piscopo says to a smattering of applause. He crosses himself, sits down at the piano, and very nervously sputters, “I was so hesitant to do it, but I feel at home among family and friends, so this is for Kimberley, and we’re going to rock it with the guys.”
Piscopo barely gets the audience’s approval to perform a straight song. It’s something they’re tolerating rather than excited about. You can feel a chill fill the room once it becomes apparent what Piscopo is doing.
“I burn inside for you every day,” Piscopo begins in a horrifyingly earnest Bob Seger growl.
While Piscopo pounds away at the piano, blurry images play in the background of his sainted Kimberley, looking blonde, teenage, and embarrassed.
Kimberley stands behind Piscopo from a pronounced distance with a look that silently but implicitly conveys that she knows that he’ll eventually end up filing domestic abuse charges against her after he leaves her for his assistant during the messy, inevitable divorce.
“They say it’s all wrong, we know it’s alright/our love is so strong, we’ve just begun to fight.” Piscopo bellows melodramatically as Kimberley watches him while clutching a single flower.
In the background, a video plays of Kimberley staring adoringly at Joe Piscopo, kissing the much older actor and generally showcasing her beauty and youth. It’s pure cheesecake, a wealthy older man showing off his hot girlfriend to a world he wants to impress.
Kimberley looks like the unfortunate winner of a pioneering reality show where the winner gets to marry Joe Piscopo, which would be a punishment for most.
“I don’t understand what your daddy doesn’t see/Our love wasn’t planned, and we were meant to be!” Piscopo sing-shouts.
I’m guessing what Kimberley’s daddy did see was a much older, wealthier man with a powerful sexual hunger for his daughter, a child just barely over the age of consent.
It’s rare to listen to a song and agree wholeheartedly with the haters, skeptics, and non-believers who are ostensibly supposed to be the bad guys. I agree with Kimberley’s dad. She should go to college, date some guys or girls her age, and enjoy being young and beautiful and free, not the trophy wife of a narcissistic New Jersey celebrity.
On the other hand, she did get ten thousand dollars a month post-divorce, so she at least got something out of that relationship.
“There’s evil forces working here, girl, they’re trying to pull us apart/But it’s true my love for you is clean and true it’s coming for my heart.” Piscopo tries to convince a public that judged his relationship because it was objectively creepy and wrong.
Age of consent laws are not evil forces. Parents who don’t want their teenage children to marry men pushing forty are not evil forces. They’re forces for good.
Then Kimberley comes out so that Piscopo can show off his sexy young girlfriend and brag about how he proposed to her all romantic-like on her birthday. Though unstated, the implication is that he waited until literally the moment she became legal to make their relationship official.
This leads to another wildly inappropriate song in a similar vein that I was obsessed with as a child.
When I was ten years old, I thought the two most romantic songs in the world were Chicago’s “You’re the Inspiration” and Benny Mardones’ “Into the Night.”
It wasn’t until I was much older that I realized how creepy the song actually is.
The opening lyrics should have been a giveaway. According to Mardones, the inspiration for the song was a struggling Hispanic family that lived near where Mardones and his collaborator Robert Tepper were writing songs.
The daughter was a sixteen-year-old who came out in an outfit one night that led Tepper to make a suggestive comment about her. In response, Mardones replied, “she's just 16 years old, leave her alone.”
That’s how “Into the Night” begins before painting a wildly melodramatic portrait of lovers “separated by fools who don’t know what love is yet.” Most of the song is devoted to a monster chorus, but there are also creepily suggestive lyrics about how the narrator of the song “would wait ’til the end of time for you” or, alternately, until they can have sex without it being statutory rape.
Mardones’ label had to send a letter to radio stations explaining that “Into the Night” was a story song about a fictional character in love with a sixteen-year-old, not an expression of the singer-songwriter’s own sexual desires.
That appeased radio stations that helped make the song a hit twice, in 1980 and 1989, but it’s doubtful audiences at the time understood the backstory of the song. It does not help that Mardones, god bless him, is not the most handsome man in the world. He looks like he belongs on a registry for sex offenders rather than Teen Beat magazine.
Subsequent generations came to know “Into the Night” as a song about a dude wanting to have sex with someone in their mid-teens. As the years passed, the song’s original context has more or less been forgotten.
That said, if you need to put out a letter explaining that you personally aren’t sexually attracted to high school sophomores but rather the character in your song feels that way, it’s probably best to just not release the song and spare us all a whole lot of ick and cringe.
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