![]() Throughout the eighties, I tended to confuse Holly Johnson with actress Lynn-Holly Johnson, best known for playing a blind ice skater in the 1978 sports-themed romance Ice Castles muddying the waters still more is Holly Body, the porn star played by Melanie Griffith in Brian De Palma’s Body Double, which plays “Relax” in its entirety during the deliriously awesome porn-film-within-a-softcore-film sequence. Frankie even had its own Commodore 64 video game, which is surely a benchmark of success.įrankie frontman Holly Johnson, née William Johnson, took his stage name from trans actress and “Walk on the Wild Side” muse Holly Woodlawn. Point being, “Relax” was a ubiquitous song throughout the mid-eighties, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood was (or were, if you’re in the UK) a global sensation. Some opportunistic US-based online t-shirt sellers are currently doing what I can only hope is a sluggish business selling t-shirts that read “FRANKIE SAYS RELAX.” This, of course, is heresy and should not be tolerated. In other words, Duran Duran is hungry like the wolf in the US, whereas Duran Duran are hungry like the wolf in the UK. The subject-verb agreement of “FRANKIE SAY RELAX” often sounds grammatically wonky to American ears, but it’s correct: While American English generally treats band names that sound singular, like Frankie Goes To Hollywood, as singular, British English treats all band names as plural. Wham! kicked this trend off in their 1984 “ Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” video, in which George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley wore baggy white t-shirts with “CHOOSE LIFE” printed on the front, while Frankie Goes to Hollywood followed on their heels with shirts that proclaimed “FRANKIE SAY RELAX.” Omnipresent throughout the eighties, the slogan later popped up as a punchline on a mid-nineties episode of Friends. In the mid-eighties, people wore their personal credos across their chests all the time. My brain resolved it as two words, ESP and SPIRIT I assumed my classmate was proclaiming her allegiance to the paranormal realm, which seemed to make a certain amount of sense. Her sweatshirt featured the brand name printed in oversized letters: ESP on the front, with the -SPRIT wrapping around under her armpit and across her back. At that moment, ESPRIT was on the cusp of becoming an eighties fashion juggernaut, and this was my first exposure to it. My classmate wore a sleeveless pastel ESPRIT sweatshirt to volleyball practice that day, which has somehow burned itself into my memory. Someday I’ll give you all an essay on Smut I Read Before I Turned Twelve, but today is not that day.) They did not I was an egalitarian devourer of smut. (I’d like to be able to point to Lady Chatterley’s Lover as proof my tastes in dirty books skewed toward the highbrow in my formative years. Those virile chaps in Frankie Goes to Hollywood could have been cumming or coming it hardly matters. I was too meek to contradict my classmate, and even in fifth grade I knew this was probably a weird hill to die on, so I nodded and agreed with her. I had my quiet doubts about this Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which I’d read earlier that year, featured many passages about orgasming, all of which used a more traditional spelling: c-o-m-e. I remember sitting on a bench in the gym with a classmate during volleyball practice, deep in conversation about “Relax.” My friend argued that the word “come,” as in “when you wanna come,” was actually spelled “cum” when used to refer to ejaculation. “Relax” is a spewing, spurting geyser of a song.Īs a fifth grader in 1985, I knew the “motivation” explanation didn’t hold water. No one at any point in history from the song’s release to the present has ever been fuzzy about the meaning of “Relax” motivational speeches, after all, rarely invoke the phrase “suck to it.” Lyrically, “Relax” is not subtle (“ shoot it in the right direction”) sonically, the track contains enough grunting and gushing to broadcast its intentions to those who don’t understand spoken English. In the liner notes to their 1984 debut album Welcome to the Pleasuredome, Frankie Goes to Hollywood bassist Mark O’Toole writes of the band’s hit “Relax,” “hen it first came out we used to pretend it was about motivation, and really it was about shagging.”
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