The award for Worldwide Worst Song and Video of the '80s

GOES TO ... TRACY SPENCER for "Take Me Back."

No, not Tracie Spencer, the "Star Search" -winning songbird who first hit in '88 at the tender age of 12, with the beautiful ballad "Hide and Seek" and the uptempo number "Symptoms of True Love." These were smart, well-put-together R&B songs and, sung in Tracie's breathy teen-age soprano, were pretty hard not to like. 

Tracie also was smart, well-put-together, and hard not to like -- which was why I was convinced that one day, when I got my own huge recording career off the ground, I was gonna meet Tracie, eventually seal the deal, and give her a bevy of beautiful, musically talented children.

In '90 Tracie had sophomore success with "Tender Kisses" and the socially conscious dance cut "This House." And more recently (okay, it was actually in 1999) she dropped an even better, even more mature album with cuts like "It's All About You" and "Still In My Heart," before dropping off the music map. Which is a shame, because the world of R&B and pop deserves better than molded-plastic vocaldroids like Beyonce and Rihanna.

This brings us to Tracy Spencer, who is some sort of alternate-universe, Italo-disco bootleg knockoff who you might find by accident upon searching for Tracie Spencer. Thanks to YouTube, we now have access to the other Spencer's oeuvre. And that ouevre is pretty awful. 

In particular, "Take Me Back":  absolute cut-rate crap material seemingly cranked out by some committee of music industry hacks trying to make a quick buck. 

To accompany the horrid, tone-deaf, synthesized, reverb-drenched* record, an appropriately corny video was produced. With the look of a bad film-school project, it contains a bunch of late-'80s cliches: deconstructed art-gallery set -- check; lots of whip-zooming in and out -- check; dance moves centered on machinelike thrusting, humping, shoulder-jiggling and stalking -- check. There are hints at sexual ambiguity and recurring shots of a mysterious male figure on a black-and-white television who looks something like a young George W. Bush. The results you can see for yourself. Tracy Spencer handily takes the worldwide prize for Worst Song and Video of the '80s.



* I'm convinced the fan who posted this video to the Italian website did something weird to the audio. The amount and heavy emphasis of reverb on this record is just unreal -- even for an '80s record.