Nights are too long for a single man...

Desperate, dogged and undistilled, Giorgio Moroder and Joe Esposito's 1983 Solitary Men sounds like Trussardi Uomo, cigarette smoke, sweat-stained Armani linens, lambent, candy-color fluorescents, cocaine and cunt - it's hedonistic electro-noir, an audiophile's neon speedball; a relentless, uncontrived, underrated, underheard, seminal masterpiece released in the same twelve-month period Moroder scored DePalma's Scarface, Schrader's Cat People and Lyne's Flashdance (*), and collaborated with Nina Hagen on the spunky fluke Fearless (in whose liner notes the Red Hot Chilli Peppers are credited as 'Inspiration'). 

Title track's an anthem, a pleading, private lamentation delivered with Southern Baptist zeal - both Esposito and synth testifying; Joe confessing regret and longing, synth responding in judgement like a hellfire preacher. So deceptively, persistently intense it would be stressful if it weren't so lush.

It also contains the best of Moroder's career-spanning covers of The Moody Blues' Nights in White Satin and the operatic, swoon-inducing Lady, Lady (shared on the original Flashdance LP release).

A meditation on the hurricane underbelly of a selfish sophisticate's semi-saved soul, Don Draper would've loved it - though he would never have admitted so.


 * Arranger/keyboardist Sylvester Levay and composer/drummer Keith Forsey would go on to score Stallone's Cobra and Hughes' The Breakfast Club, respectively, whilst bassist/guitarist Richie Zito is the auteur behind your favorite 80s hair band hits. 

Never sleep by myself / Cuz nights are too long / For a single man / 

No connections, no ties / Hello and goodbye / That's the way I am / 

I can't satisfy your dream / Don't you hang your heart on me / 

I love you hard, I love you long / Leave before you know I've gone...  

The evening heat / On the city street / The light a shade of sleazy blue /

Sick and tired of thinking / Did some serious drinking / Rang numbers that I thought I knew /

A silky white blouse / Full of promise to rouse / The motor that controls my soul / 

Laced with private perfume / She made me an offer / An offer too good to refuse (just couldn't refuse)...

For further historical and badass cred. 

500 Pop Culture References of Summer

500 Days of Summer (2009, Marc Webb) - Boy meets girl.

Woody Allen - nay, Nora Ephron (replete with five or eight music video montages) - by way of Tarantino (minus violence) and Kevin Smith (minus porntalk and gratuitous cameos), this is another film geek pastiche, every scene lifted from some other pop movie (seconds into You Make My Dreams Come True sequence, I was thinking Fletch Lives, and two minutes later, the cartoon birdie appeared), with the kind of clever, precious dialogue (same writers wrote Pink Panther 2) wherein a ten year-old references Freud and everyone references pop culture.

There's also a narrator.

For yuppies too young to remember Rushmore, let alone The Graduate.