Worst Songs Ever: Dire Straits’ ‘Walk of Life’

Like a good single, a terrible one reveals itself with airplay and forbearance. I don’t want to hate songs; to do so would shake ever-sensitive follicles, and styling gel is expensive. I promise my readers that my list will when possible eschew obvious selections. Songs beloved by colleagues and songs to which I’m supposed to genuflect will get my full hurricane-force winds, but it doesn’t mean that I won’t take shots at a jukebox hero overplayed when I was at a college bar drinking a cranberry vodka in a plastic thimble-sized cup.

Dire Straits’ “Walk of Life”
PEAK CHART POSITION: #4 in January 1986

No act’s success signaled the clout of the boomer generation than Dire Straits in 1985, whose videos remade MTV into VH-1 before VH-1 went live. That a man as resistant to photogenic charm – any charm – as Mark Knopfler earned as large a payday in 1985-1986, despite wearing a red bandanna and growing hair for which Robin Gibb got ridicule a few years earlier, says much about a need to wrest radio and video charts from what Knopfler or Knopfler’s stand-in called the little faggots on that MTV. Released in late summer, Brothers in Arms ruled American and England that autumn, eventually shipping nine million albums and going ten times platinum, respectively – staggering figures for an act that had hung in there but suffered from market fluctuations after “Sultans of Swing.”

To understand “Walk of Life,” look to the mythos of baseball, luxuriant during this period. The year before the release of Brothers in Arms the film version of Bernard Malamud’s The Natural did decent box office and produced an inexplicable Oscar nomination for Glenn Close. In 1985, MTV played the hell out of two singles by sturdy white dudes: John Fogerty’s “Centerfield” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days.” The former, reliant on a riff that nods toward “La Bamba,” doubles as a metaphor for Fogerty’s renewed vigor for playing the chart game; the latter depends on a scrappy rhythm lick and Springsteen’s motormouth delivery, as if he were the character in the bar who after a few beers with his nostalgia-drunk buddy steps in front of the mike. “Centerfield” and “Glory Days” boast prominent organ parts, played respectively by Fogerty and Danny Federici, like baseball fans of a certain age would have heard live at the ballpark.

Of course, Fogerty and Springsteen couldn’t have known when recording their albums that the American public would keep Ronald Reagan in the White House another four years by one of the largest electoral mandates in history. The Reagan who had misappropriated Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” was a master at embodying the kind of heroism that turned to blarney after a few seconds’ exposure to sunlight and David Brinkley. He encouraged nostalgia — it was another consumable object like VCRs and sushi. The sudden enthusiasm for baseball in pop songs reflected a longing for times that no one had experienced. In 1985, recall, John Rambo would return to Vietnam to finish the war that the wussies in Washington could not.

Although “Walk of Life” is about a Deacon Blues type — Johnny, a musician who plays the oldies and may or may not drink scotch whisky all night long — American baseball has accepted Knopfler’s song like the rest of the country did Princess Di (the video includes a montage of American sports as if for UNICEF purposes). The organ, mixed to sound like a Reagan campaign rally, is the giveaway. Soaked in Dylanology, Knopfler’s grumpy warble bestirs itself to celebrate a dude whose journeyman virtues can slide into hackdom without effort — a bit like Dire Straits. References to “What’d I Say,” “Mack the Knife,” and “My Sweet Lovin’ Woman” dot the song like raisins in a cake. “Walk of Life” is among the most enervated of homages; even a world-class drummer like Omar Hakim, fresh off Bryan Ferry’s Boys + Girls, has to pretend athletes have no moves. Because nostalgia is cool like faggot references aren’t, “Walk of Life” has become a perennial on eighties adult contemporary radio like “Money For Nothing” hasn’t.

“Mixed with this arrogance is a world-weariness which you don’t feel Knopfler has really earned,” Marcello Carlin wrote in a withering 2014 reappraisal. “[Brothers in Arms] is a record of entitlement, smugness and assumed superiority.” Knopfler might be Jean Hagen’s Lena in Singin’ in the Rain singing, “If we’ve brought a little joy into your humdrum lives, then we feel our hard work ain’t been in vain” — in a grumpy warble, no doubt.