Challenge accepted

After my adventures in the land of folk metal music, a friend challenged me to find the musical and aesthetic opposite of the various metal bands I've been obsessing over: the Finnish band, Korpiklaani; Mongolian band The Hu, and Indonesian metal trio Voice of Bacepot. 
 
Never one to dodge a good challenge, friends, I think I've found it!
 
Here is the musical and aesthetic antithesis of metal, and it comes with a warning: you may need your sunglasses on to watch it. There is a lamentable excess of purple and orange in this video. Also an excess of teeth.


The year was 1975. Cher had her own TV show, called, appropriately, Cher, and Donny Osmond was the teen heart-throb of the moment. Over the next couple of years Donny and Michael Jackson would go head to head competing for the hearts - and bedroom walls - of teenage girls everywhere*, but in 1975 it was all Donny and his big brothers.

So who ultimately won the Donny V Michael contest in the 70s? In the short term, probably Donny. After performing as one-fifth of the Osmond Brothers (there were actually six of them but Jimmy was a later addition to the group) he went solo, then teamed up with his sister, Marie, with whom he had several hit songs. The two hosted a TV show (The Donny and Marie Show) in the late 70s before pretty much vanishing after 1980. 

By then, Michael Jackson's star was definitely in the ascendancy. The Jackson Five had several big hits before Michael released his solo album Off the Wall in 1979 and then Thriller in 1982, which remains the biggest selling album of all time. Musically, Donny never came close to anything Michael produced, but the latter's life was way more controversial. His brief marital skirmish with Lisa Marie Presley; his three children to two different mothers, both of whom ceded full custody of their children to Jackson; his reclusiveness; his visual transformation with plastic surgery; and the allegations of child sex abuse leading to the 2005 criminal trial (at which he was acquitted), all clouded his musical legacy. Finally, his death in 2009 at the age of 50 due to an overdose and/or addiction to prescription medication closed the curtain on a brilliant career.

Donny, meanwhile, married, had five sons, no controversies and still performs. So who won the Donny V Michael contest? While Osmond will never come anywhere near Jackson in terms of musical legacy, he's at least still alive and performing at 65, so maybe call it a draw?

Anyway, the video of Cher and the Osmonds is cheesy even by the standards of 1975, a time when musical variety shows, purple jumpsuits on blokes and wearing someone's pet poodle on your head were somehow acceptable. (The Jackson Five also appeared with Cher on her show but in silver-trimmed tuxedos rather than purple jumpsuits).


* Just for the record, neither of them ever made it on to my bedroom wall.


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