{"id":27764,"date":"2022-08-09T07:33:47","date_gmt":"2022-08-09T12:33:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maggipicayune.derr.io\/wp\/?p=27764"},"modified":"2022-08-11T07:37:52","modified_gmt":"2022-08-11T12:37:52","slug":"rip-olivia-newton-john","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maggipicayune.derr.io\/wp\/2022\/08\/09\/rip-olivia-newton-john\/","title":{"rendered":"RIP Olivia Newton John"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Olivia was a huge artist in the soundtrack of my grade school days. Even before every other kid at St. Matthew&#8217;s got the\u00a0<em>Grease<\/em> soundtrack as a gift, she was a staple of AM radio via WLS (Chicago) with her Soft Rock hits. The glamorized (and sanitized) Fifties\u00ae flick just made her a bigger star alongside John Travolta.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Two years later came\u00a0<em>Xanadu\u00a0<\/em>which was the soundtrack my mother played to death in our house! Thanks to Mom, it took me about a decade before I could listen to ELO again; it wasn&#8217;t Jeff Lynne&#8217;s best work. I could be wrong but I think\u00a0<em>Xanadu\u00a0<\/em>was a flop so it lives on as a cult flick for its pure cheese. To me, I felt the people producing it were trying too hard, believing that Gene Kelly&#8217;s fanbase still went to the movies in 1980.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Olivia dodged the fallout of the movie&#8217;s failure by hitching her wagon to the early Eighties fitness craze mostly attributed to Jane Fonda with her hit single and album\u00a0<em>Physical<\/em>. The song gave a boost to numerous mediocre comedians as they used it as their lazy punchline for a year and then had to wait for Joey Buttafuoco and Amy Fisher&#8217;s murder conspiracy. How I cringed when\u00a0<\/span><i>Mork &amp; Mindy <\/i>referenced it for a sexual innuendo.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Then somebody in Hollywood went against all good advice by having Olivia re-team up with John Travolta in\u00a0<i>Two\u00a0of a Kind<\/i>. By now it was 1983. Travolta&#8217;s fame was waning because he couldn&#8217;t shake off his association with Disco from <em>Saturday Night Fever\u00a0<\/em>although he did briefly with\u00a0<em>Urban Cowboy;<\/em>\u00a0this success only made him more uncool to Generation X and younger Boomers (aka Generation Jones). My brother saw\u00a0<em>Two<\/em>, said it was pretty abysmal.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Her 1985 comeback\u00a0<em>Soul Kiss<\/em> embodied all the excesses of production for that big-haired decade. Afterwards I wouldn&#8217;t say Olivia disappeared, more like she slowly faded away into Adult Contemporary and semi-retirement with a couple more releases in the Eighties and Nineties. Obviously, we all know cancer was another factor in slowing down her ability to keep performing. I am glad she defeated the illness as long as she could.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Thanks for everything Olivia. My previous negative-sounding comments are of my past thoughts. I had a major reconciliation with the Seventies by ignoring FM radio for a long time so I am truly going to miss you, especially those memories of coming home from St. Agnes and finding my mom jamming to\u00a0<em>Xanadu<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Olivia was a huge artist in the soundtrack of my grade school days. Even before every other kid at St. Matthew&#8217;s got the\u00a0Grease soundtrack as a gift, she was a staple of AM radio via WLS (Chicago) with her Soft &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/maggipicayune.derr.io\/wp\/2022\/08\/09\/rip-olivia-newton-john\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,20],"tags":[457,144,154],"class_list":["post-27764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies","category-music","tag-celebrity-obituary","tag-eighties","tag-seventies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maggipicayune.derr.io\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maggipicayune.derr.io\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maggipicayune.derr.io\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maggipicayune.derr.io\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maggipicayune.derr.io\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27764"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/maggipicayune.derr.io\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27764\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27767,"href":"https:\/\/maggipicayune.derr.io\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27764\/revisions\/27767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maggipicayune.derr.io\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maggipicayune.derr.io\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maggipicayune.derr.io\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}