Back to the 1980s

  Four decades ago, inspired by a double-feature of two infamous movie musicals — Olivia Newton-John’s Olympian roller-boogie fantasy   Xanadu  and the Village People’s last-days-of-disco debacle   Can’t Stop the Music   — entertainment publicist   John Wilson held the potluck Oscar party   that launched the Golden Raspberry Awards recognizing the very worst in film. The inaugural Razzies took place during a fascinating on-the-cusp age of musical cinema, the late ‘70s/early ‘80s, when hard rock, punk, new wave, glam, disco, and even big-band all merged and mashed — sometimes successfully ( Grease ,   Fame ,   Pink Floyd’s The Wall ), sometimes not much ( Sgt. Pepper ,   The Apple ,   KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park ,   Pennies From Heaven, Popeye , and of course, the two above-mentioned flicks). Xanadu , for what it’s worth, “lost” the Razzie to the Village People (as did Neil Diamond’s even cringey-er nominee,  The Jaz...

  When Olivia Newton-John recorded her 12th studio album,   Physical , 40 years ago, she’d already begun her evolution from wholesome ingenue to sexually assertive pop-rock provocateur — a life-imitating-art metamorphosis not unlike that of her Sandy character in   Grease   — with her previous album, 1978’s   Totally Hot .  But no one, not even the singer herself, was prepared for the sexy image makeover that was ushered in by  Physical ’s title track — when a sweatbanded, hot ‘n’ bothered Olivia straight-up told the object of her desire, “There's nothing left to talk about, unless it's horizontally.” It’s perhaps a tame lyric by 2021 standards, but it was downright scandalous when it was released on Sept. 28, 1981, two days after the singer's 33rd birthday. At first, Newton-John actually rejected “Physical” — which was originally intended for a “macho male rock figure like Rod Stewart,” according its co-writer, Steve Kipner, and later passed over by a...