So this is one of those goosebumpy radio classics for Voguing to Danzig. It rewinds me all the way back to Happy Acres summer camp, where the counselors would sometimes switch on a radio right after naptime, and "Gloria" would invariably pour out in ecstatic-if-desperate waves, being a hit single at the time, all synth-aerobics on the choruses and tense pianos on the verses, Laura Branigan screaming disco at or celebrating some chick named Gloria or whatever. That 80s-dynamic, cheesy intro would zipper-apart and have me up from under my blanket, just wilding the fuck out, really, because my mom's first name was Gloria, too, and even though I wasn't conscious of what "Gloria" was actually about in any way, shape, or form - twas all church-choir chorus and unfadable hook to me at that point - I guess I just liked to pretend, on some superficial level, that it was about Mom. Listening to the song today, of course, it's pretty clear that this is kind of a "don't be a slut/don't spread yourself too thin/don't let yourself be used/respect yourself" anthem, see also the Eurhythmics' "Sweet Dreams" - a sentiment worth repeating in any event but one that I needed to heed much more than my mother ever did. It feels like a warning I missed. Too much of my adolesence and young adulthood was spent wanting for certain people to like me, to want me around, to miss me; I deluded myself time and time again, trying too hard to be indispensible to folks who, I should've known then, had no interest in taking me on as a friend or anything more serious than that. So much effort and energy and emotion was wasted on these doomed pursuits that could've been better expended artistically or scholasticly that it's almost embarrassing. Shame on me for not paying enough attention then. All that baggage aside, "Gloria" still packs a nostalgic thrill on par with "Uptown Girl" and "Karma Chameleon" and "Pick Me Up Before You Go Go" - it's just so vibrant, insistent, and alive that it invokes the memories surrounding it with every play.
Something I didn't know until just recently: Branigan's "Gloria" is actually a cover, so the sentiments therein aren't actually hers. Yet the singer invests the content with such passion that it seems as though she's actually addressing an actual person, or maybe just herself, sinking her lungpower deep into disclaimers like "Gloria/You're always on the run now/Running off with somebody, you gotta get 'em somehow" and "I think you're headed for a breakdown/So be careful what you're showing" and "How's it gonna go down?/Will you meet him on the mainline or will you catch him on the rebound" and "I think they've got your number/I think they've got the alias you've been living under" and "Will you marry for the money?/Take a lover in the afternoons?" Whenever I listen to "Gloria" now, I imagine a young girl on the precipice of womanhood, confronted by a sprawling battery of life choices - some good, some bad - and totally baffled as to which moves are the best to make and which ones should be avoided at all costs. In that context, "Gloria"-as-song is like a concerned older sister or best friend or mother loudly chipping in two cents. If Branigan - or, indeed, the original songwriter - was envisioning an actual person as the target for "Gloria," I wonder what choices she eventually decided to make, what paths she followed, if she's able to live with the consequences of whatever happened after she screwed up all her courage and leapt bravely out into that abyss. We'll probably never know.
Something I didn't know until just recently: Branigan's "Gloria" is actually a cover, so the sentiments therein aren't actually hers. Yet the singer invests the content with such passion that it seems as though she's actually addressing an actual person, or maybe just herself, sinking her lungpower deep into disclaimers like "Gloria/You're always on the run now/Running off with somebody, you gotta get 'em somehow" and "I think you're headed for a breakdown/So be careful what you're showing" and "How's it gonna go down?/Will you meet him on the mainline or will you catch him on the rebound" and "I think they've got your number/I think they've got the alias you've been living under" and "Will you marry for the money?/Take a lover in the afternoons?" Whenever I listen to "Gloria" now, I imagine a young girl on the precipice of womanhood, confronted by a sprawling battery of life choices - some good, some bad - and totally baffled as to which moves are the best to make and which ones should be avoided at all costs. In that context, "Gloria"-as-song is like a concerned older sister or best friend or mother loudly chipping in two cents. If Branigan - or, indeed, the original songwriter - was envisioning an actual person as the target for "Gloria," I wonder what choices she eventually decided to make, what paths she followed, if she's able to live with the consequences of whatever happened after she screwed up all her courage and leapt bravely out into that abyss. We'll probably never know.
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