"Into The Night" by Benny Mardones

She's just sixteen years old.
Leave her alone, they say.
Separated by fools
who don't know what love is yet.

But I want you to know:
If I could fly, I'd pick you up
and take you into the night, and show you a love
like you've never seen. Ever seen.

You know, I keep trying to ignore this song. "Nobody's ever heard of it," I tell myself. "It's crap by a one-hit wonder." But it's such a masterpiece -- such a massive chunk of addictive, indelible crap -- that I can't get it out of my head. I'm hoping if I let my feelings out, I'll exorcise this overwrought demon once and for all.

The first few lines are exemplary writing, establishing the mood really well. I think everyone is in agreement: the singer is a total creep. People are telling him to stay away from a sixteen-year-old girl, meaning he has to be forty at least, or twenty-five if he's unemployed. But it's love, he insists, like some of the forty-year-old men who creep on sixteen-year-olds go, "You caught me! I just wanted to bang her! Okay, I'll go away now." But the singer is insistent, and hopes to convince his beloved of his good intentions.

"If I could fly," he croons, "I'd pick you up."

Okay, so dude is kind of stumbling out of the gate. If you want to win somebody over, in my humble opinion, the first thing you want to offer them is probably not a ride. Apparently he's differentiating himself from all of those guys who want you to meet them at the mall.

Still, we've got our fingers crossed. He still has a shot if he's planning on taking the young lady somewhere really cool. He can still salvage this if he's got airline tickets to Paris, or he booked a hot-air balloon. We don't have much hope, since he could have left out the whole "pick you up" part, because none of us are assuming he was going to drag her there by rope. But he's faring better than my German boyfriend who would have included lines about packing a lunch and visiting the toilet beforehand.

But our hopes are dashed and the song crashes and burns. This Casanova would pick you up "[a]nd take you into the night. And show you a love."

Got that? I mean, I'm not a real high-maintenance guy -- you don't have to make restaurant reservations for our date, or buy opera tickets, or hire a pony -- but I require a little more than the promise that our excursion will include seeing dark. My little heart doesn't race when a guy pulls me close and says, "See that, baby? You're not always stuck in sunlight when you're with me.

I'm not sure why dude is aiming so low. Doesn't he have something a little better to offer? Maybe he's has been burned before: maybe he's flashing back on that time he promised a young lady that they absolutely, positively wouldn't have dinner at 7-Eleven. And then he wouldn't get arrested, and then he wouldn't poop his pants. "Show you a love"? He can do anything from giving her flowers to whipping out his dick and she can't say he didn't warn her.

You know your dad wouldn't fall for that shit:

DAD: You're going to take her where?

BENNY: Uh, into the night.

DAD: Oh, wow. I used to go there a lot with her mom. Okay, you two kids have fun!

There aren't a lot of promises that are worse than "We'll go see Cats but dude has definitely found one.

The song never says what happens, but I bet the guy's lack of ambition destroyed the relationship. It makes me makes me wonder what he would do if he were granted superpowers. If he had x-ray vision, would he peer into dumpsters to find the bottles with high redemption value? If he could swim super-fast, would he use it to confuse people as to exactly who peed in the pool? You imagine a sequel where he sings, "If I could turn invisible, I'd sneak into Paul Rudd's house and put my testicles on his hair."

Still, even that wouldn't haunt me like the original, unless there was a video.