Matthew Kelly1001 Albums You Must Die Before You Hear
#120: David Hasselhoff – Crazy For You (1990)
Part Four Of A Survey Of The Complete Musical Works Of Sir David Michael Hasselhoff by the man who listens to more bad records than anyone else on the planet, MATT KELLY.
So you think David Hasselhoff’s career has been a meme so far? I’ve got news for you – he has not yet begun to meme. Drop everything and listen to this album’s ‘Keep The Jungle Alive’ right now – a mind-blowingly kitschy down-with-the-kids environmental awareness track on which Hasselhoff, no doubt wearing a backwards baseball cap and holding a skateboard, raps:
“We’re killing all the trees
We’re killing all the seas
The fish and animals cry
Hey! what you doing man
You’d better find a plan
Or else all of us will just die!”
This, over jungle drums, Public Enemy style samples, and the nastiest, cheapest synths in town. And it’s six minutes long.
It didn’t stop this album from doing business, hitting #1 in Austria and Switzerland and becoming his best-selling record. And you know what, I kinda like it. It’s the most Hoff, and therefore the best album so far.
The success of the previous record Looking For Freedom means Hoff and his producer, Jack White, are full of confidence, making Crazy For You a wonderful snapshot of a time before ’90s alt-rock exploded and the concepts of cringe and irony swept the musical landscape.
He and his dime-store synthesizers are having such a good time on the title track, the lack of songwriting craft or production nuance and Hasselhoff’s karaoke vocals become positives as the album invites you to forget about being sophisticated or cool and just belt out some huge tunes.
There’s a bombastic, big-screen quality to CFY – terrific ’80s cheese like ‘Passion’ was made for training montages, and synth-rocker ‘I Wanna Move To The Beat Of Your Heart’ should have played over the credits of a teen romcom. Whether he’s keeping it sexy and sensitive and looking right into your soul with those baby blues of his on the balladry of ‘Was It Real Love’ or going in the opposite direction with the astroturfed party hard anthem ‘Let’s Dance Tonight’ (which throws EVERYTHING at wall with bass synths, electric guitars, 808 claps, OH-WHOA-OH backing vocals and more), Hasselhoff may be embodying corny old tropes of popular music but god dammit he’s embodying them as hard as he can and the commitment is impressive.
He even gets a bit Hi NRG with ‘Let’s Spend The Night Together’, and if there’s something we can all agree the world needs more of, it’s Hasselhoff songs you can play at disco nights at a club called Man2Man. Sometimes it’s too much to bear: ‘One And One Make Three’, a song sung to welcome Hasselhoff’s newborn daughter Taylor makes ‘When A Child Is Born’ sound like ‘Ace Of Spades’.
Yet the good thing about Hoff is that his failures tend to be amusing. Overreaching final track ‘Lights In The Darkness’ celebrates the fall of the USSR in comically naive and insensitive fashion, made even funnier by it featuring his worst vocal of the album. And it has a fucking awful children’s choir too. Magnificent.
If you’re only going to suffer through one Hasselhoff album in your lifetime, this may be the one to go with. A kitsch classic.
World’s Worst Records – David Hasselhoff’s Looking For Freedom
