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Monday, October 11, 2010

"I Just Want to Be Your Everything" (1977)

57. Andy Gibb, "I Just Want to Be Your Everything" (May 28, 1977, #1, 4 wks.)

The best song by Andy Gibb and with only one exception I think the best of everything from the family in toto. I mean, Barry Gibb is co-author, and it comes at arguably the height of their powers within the disco empire. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a Bee Gees song. And what a Bee Gees song. When they reach for those high notes on the chorus, feeling for the "I" in "I just want to be your everything," it feels and sounds for a moment as if it could be angels themselves, a herd of them, standing at the finish line waiting for you, cheering you on, putting down all their side bets for you. They're bringing this horse in and that horse is you. In fact, they've got the house down on it. They just want to be my everything? Uh, that's a little general, isn't it fellas? Uh, no, JPK, that seems to be exactly as intended. This bracing little piece turns its figurative face full to the sun, absorbing and casting back the light all radiant and pure and blinding, a simple and brave statement of optimism even in its embrace of an insouciant confidence, not to mention the hope it explicitly engenders. Oddly, this came at a time when the Bee Gees seemed always to surprise, following one on another a minor string of hits and, even at that very moment, in the process of parlaying a movie tie-in into a small-bore empire of its own. But that was for the future. For the time being there was this simple and expedient and supple and breathtaking declaration.

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