Christopher Cross (1979)

Artist: Christopher Cross
Release Year: 1979

Rating: 7/10

Track Listing: 1) Say You'll Be Mine; 2) I Really Don't Know Anymore; 3) Spinning; 4) Never Be the Same; 5) Poor Shirley; 6) Ride Like the Wind; 7) The Light Is On; 8) Sailing; 9) Minstrel Gigolo.

There's so much "nothing" to be said about adult contemporary product like this, except that sometimes there's so much praise to heap on it anyway.  

In a flash of revelation, I realized this album is like a Bob Ross painting: it's pretty, everything is rendered properly, all the brushstrokes are in the right places, it's perfectly suitable to hang in your guest room, and most would never notice the lack of whatever "edge" is demanded by more discerning eyes.  I mean, who wouldn't love the "happy little trees" and everything that makes us feel all cozy inside?  It's just not "high art", perhaps because there's no subtlety or ambiguity: what you see is what you get, and you could just as well have taken a photograph.  But that misses the point when both artist and audience manage to get something more out of the process, even if I personally would toss it out in favor of Remain in Light or something that ruffles a few more feathers.

One could insist that "real" art could never be churned out in the space of a half hour the way Bob Ross did it, that the result could be nothing more than glossy, cynical, soulless product; yet, we must remember a few things.  The "high art" we see in galleries would be meaningless without our ability to contrast it against the mounds of "low art" that hangs in our in-laws' dining rooms, and we must eventually confront the reality that some of that "low art" is, in fact, very very nice, and we look forward to seeing it when we sit down for a meal on Sunday night.  

Long story short, sometimes that so-called dreck is made by a professional who does know exactly what they are doing, and just so happens to produce something that sells very well.  That's what I think happened here.  The album may be as edgy and subversive as a scented pinecone, but I don't call Cross himself a sellout-- judging by his obvious talents, he just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

Philosophy aside, I've yet to describe what this album sounds like, but I don't feel bad about that.  You know "Ride Like the Wind" and you know "Sailing", and the other seven songs are essentially different ratios of one to the other.  It's all yacht rock par excellence-- hell, Michael McDonald even shows up for a few songs!  All the acoustic guitar, piano, strings, brass accents, and tasteful jazzy electric guitar licks you can desire for a well-groomed, acceptable evening out on a patio in a little gated subdivision...you know the rest.  I should hate how much I like this album, but I don't.  

Yes, that flamingo ended up being the perfect logo for Christopher Cross: calming, superficially beautiful, marketable, inoffensive, sentimental...and a plastic product for tacky people to display on their front lawns.  But sometimes that's fine.  All the saccharine utterances of "it may take me a long long time" and "save ourselves from all of our pain" and whatnot should make me puke, but the truth is that it's just done so wonderfully that I can't seriously condemn a second of this album.  I'll just keep trying to forget that all that neutered, sterile, synthetic production managed to edge out The Wall for Album of the Year.