Foreigner, Head Games (Atlantic, 1979)

 

By Null

I’ve never been a Foreigner fan. Even when I was a young kid in the late 1970s, the only impression I got from the band was sweaty polyester, testosterone-driven, mediocrity. If stinky jock straps in a high school locker room had a sound, and not just a smell, they would sound like Foreigner. The cover of the album Head Games did little to dissuade my opinion, as it looks like an advert for a slasher/rape scene. SoDak and I wrote a review of weird albums covers a few years ago and we included Head Games in our list for this very reason. You can check out that review here: https://tickleyourtaint.blogspot.com/search?q=album+covers.

Now, I don’t want to come off as a jerk. Maybe the guys in Foreigner are great people. I don’t know. Usually, I can find something interesting even in music I dislike. In addition, sometimes, a band I can’t stand has a few decent songs based purely on a memory of a specific time and place. Thus, I have a confession here. The Foreigner song, “Waiting for a Girl Like You,” on the Footloose soundtrack is okay. It makes me feel nostalgic and sad, like a puberty heartache, or something. It’s got a gentle atmosphere about it. Foreigner also reminds me of being a small child curled up in the back seat of the car, driving many miles through the country on cold dark nights going to my older step-brother’s wrestling matches. This was something I didn’t look forward to, or enjoy, but I guess I was too young to leave home alone at the time. Foreigner was all over the radio back then. The other exception, and I hate to admit this, is that if I am driving alone somewhere and “I Want to Know What Love Is” comes on the radio, I don’t change the station and I get a little emotional. I don’t know why. Don’t tell anyone. Anyway, that came out years later, right? Was it 1984?

Anyway, I digress. The point is I hate Foreigner. You may ask, then why did you listen to Head Games? The answer is that sometimes I make bad choices. The album was on my radar after SoDak and I reviewed the album cover and I just happened to be in a used record store and saw the LP for a buck, so I thought, “Ya know I should listen to this just for good measure. Just to experience the horrors that lie beneath the retched album cover.” I had never listened to an entire Foreigner album before.

So, I listened to it. It wasn’t worth the buck I paid. What a horrible record. It is exactly what I expected and only solidified my decades long opinion of the band.

The album starts off with “Dirty White Boy,” which is a song that just makes me think of gross hyper-sexual guys in my high school PE class who talked about “pussy” constantly. Gross.

The next song is “Love on the Telephone,” which makes me want to hit myself in the head with a hammer repeatedly. Boring crap.

By the time I got to the third song, “Women,” I realized that I may have been mistaken when I have stated that Kiss are the worst lyricist of all time. It’s actually Foreigner. 

What follows are the lyrics to “Women.” I have them here in their entirety so you can get a sense of the horror that goes on for a full three and half minutes. 

Women behind bars

Women in fast cars

Women in distress

Women with no dress

Women in aeroplanes

Women who play games

Women in uniform

See that woman with her clothes torn

Women who satisfy

Women you can’t buy

Like women in magazines

And women in a limousine

Women who sip champagne

Women who feel no pain

Women in a disco

And women who don’t wanna know, know, know

Oh women wanting sympathy

Women feeling ecstasy

Women who live in fantasies

Bringing man to his knees

Women who fall in love

Women who need a shove

Women who can’t be beat

Get that woman in the back seat, yeah, yeah

Women in the U.S.A.

Those women steal your heart away

Women into rock ‘n’ roll

Women who steal the show, go, go, go

Women that you write songs about

Women that turn around and kick you out

Women you dream about all your life

Women that stab you in the back with a switchblade knife

Oh women, ooh, ooh

Talk about women

Around the world

Yeah women

Oh no, it goes

Talkin’ ‘bout women

C’mon baby

Holy crap.

I suffered through the rest of the album like a paint-by-numbers hair-shirt exercise. The song “Head Games” eventually shows up on side 2. However, by that point I couldn’t even wax nostalgic for the long drive in the cold, backseat of a car rumbling down country roads.

This album is awful. I don’t even want to talk about it anymore.