Sunday 10 May 2009

Joan Osborne 'One Of Us'

Chart Peak: 6

YouTube

I'm not sure that YouTube is exactly the original single version, but it's the only copy of the record I could find on there that hadn't been forcibly silenced by WMG (even though it was released by a different label). There are a lot of covers on there though, including one by the artist formerly known as Prince. Sometimes this sort of thing might tempt me to give the record a bad review, but fortunately that doesn't apply in this case: I hated it already.

I recalled 'One Of Us' as one of a rank of one-off hits around this time by female singer-songwriters that were supposed to be really thought-provoking but, as the comedian Jim Tavare once put it, made you think, "Who put this rubbish on?" It hasn't improved much with age, although I did learn that this wasn't actually written by Osborne but by Eric Bazillian; he'd previously been a member of The Hooters, whose only British hit 'Satellite' had a similar vaguely religious theme. It's not clear whether this song is supposed to be funny or important but either way it seems to miss the mark completely, raising a series of dull questions in a dull way that invites derision long before the infamous rhyme "Nobody calling on the phone/'Cept for the Pope maybe in Rome". Maybe there's a good song to be written about the idea of God travelling incognito in the human world, but this certainly isn't it. On the positive side, her voice isn't as bad as I remembered it.

Available on: Relish

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