Will Powers

  • Will Powers
  • Dancing for Mental Health (Island) 1983 

The vast web of rock’n’roll seems capable of stretching to include virtually any bizarre concept anyone cares to bring to it, but this strangely strange album clearly exists in a weird league all its own. Simply outlined, it consists of New York photographer Lynn Goldsmith reciting motivational self-improvement exhortations and emotional psychodrama, mostly in a synthetically altered ersatz-male voice, over busy dance music co-written variously by Sting, Steve Winwood, Tom Bailey, Nile Rodgers and Todd Rundgren and performed by an uncredited crew, all ostensibly produced by Goldsmith. A phenomenal exercise of super-ego, this is both a Great Artistic Achievement and an unbelievably smug heap of horse puckey.

[Ira Robbins]