What is the worst platinum single of all time?
Any artist starting their career is going to find it hard to digest earning platinum records.
It’s hard enough trying to get five people to listen to one of your songs when starting out, so the idea of a million copies of something being sold doesn’t even feel tangible half the time. But whereas acts like The Beatles and Michael Jackson kept pumping out one timeless hit after another, there are always going to be singles that have the same staying power as stale cottage cheese.
That’s not even the song’s fault half the time. Any artist needs to follow trends to stay relevant, but if people like David Bowie and Madonna tried to reinvent themselves every time they made a new record, there were always going to be artists who tried to switch things up and came together with a hell of a thud. But the worst single of all time doesn’t have to always be atrocious from a raw listening perspective, either.
You see, bad is the absence of good all the time, and while even the most wretched songs give fans something to talk about or at least gawk at in disgust, every artist’s worst fear is to have a song that turns into glorified elevator music for anyone who’s listening when it comes up on a playlist. And while rock and roll could get a little bit same-y sounding going into the 1970s, the pop world was a completely different story.
The modern idea of pop music was still rock and roll to a large extent, but it’s not like there weren’t some great pop artists out there. ABBA were making fantastic songs throughout their time together, and even the crooners of the day, like The Carpenters, had their moments in moderation. But somewhere in the midst of Led Zeppelin and the Captain and Tenille, Debby Boone stormed to the top charts with one of the most faceless songs of all time.
Then again, Boone’s ‘You Light Up My Life’ is by no means bad because of her performance. She’s a more-than-capable vocalist and sings the whole thing pitch-perfect, but the entire premise of the song feels so flabby. All the great love songs ever made have a little bit of personality behind them, and while Boone isn’t mandated to be seductive by any means, the phrase ‘You Light Up My Life’ is almost aggressively wholesome in some respects.
Which doesn’t really help when he talked about her own interpretation of the song. While the lyrics are so vague that they could apply to virtually anything, her decision to base her entire performance on her love for Jesus is a little bit awkward.
Religious music might certainly have its place in the world, but this is far from the majesty that comes with hearing choirs singing Handel’s Messiah. This is the oddly chipper music that laid the groundwork for the modern Christian rock sphere, and I use the term “rock” there in the same way that people use the word “cheese” when talking about spray cheese. It’s definitely got the same shape as the real thing, but everyone knows that it’s not exactly authentic.
The song might feel incredibly processed, but I suppose that was the whole point. It was made for a movie, after all, so there were always going to be parameters that they needed to work around to appeal to the most people in the theatre. It certainly did its job by becoming one of the most profitable singles of all time, but the fact that this broke down doors for what the soundtrack song could be is proof that history can sometimes be absolutely hilarious when it wants to be.
Because had it not been for this song, there’s a chance we wouldn’t have got Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’, Celine Dion’s ‘My Heart Will Go On’, or even ‘All the Stars’ with Kendrick Lamar and SZA. All of them are absolutely fantastic tracks, and yet all of them stemmed from one of the most milquetoast singles that the 1970s ever spat out. Boone has since done very well for herself and even transitioned into the world of country and eventually Christian music, but considering all the game-changing music coming out at the time, it definitely feels strange seeing this among that company.
