The Atrocious Music Collection: #32 in a series
Artists: Various
Album Title: The Hot Ones
Category: K-Tel CompilationYears: 1978
Cover art style: All about the sales pitch: 18 Top Hits! Original Artists! Record, only $5.99! 8-Track tape, only $6.99!
Audio: see below
Acquisition: Left at the party, but originally purchased by someone at a yard sale for 10 cents because the sticker is still on the back.
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K-tel International is a Canadian company which specialized in selling consumer products through infomercials and live demonstration. Its products include compilation music albums, including The Super Hits series, The Dynamic Hits series and The Number One Hits series and consumer products, including The Record Selector, Veg-O-Matic, Miracle Brush, and The Feather Touch Knife. The company has sold more than half a billion units worldwide.
Since the choice to put The Hot Ones into the collection was essentially someone else’s – someone who came to the Atrocious Music Party with this two-record set and left it with me – I don’t have to defend it. Hits from Saturday Night Fever like If I Can’t Have You, Disco Inferno, and Boogie Shoes are clearly not Atrocious. ABBA’s The Name of the Game is not Atrocious. Barry White is never Atrocious. Flashlight may get annoying, but it is also not Atrocious. And I distinctly remember doing the “oooa oooa” from the Michael Zager Band’s Let's All Chant in high school because that was something cool people did. Right?
In the end, the Atrocious qualities of this double album are its K-Tel-ness, its essential nature as a product occupying a certain tier of the record industry. K-Tel international was early on the infomercial bandwagon, one the inventors of the form, selling kitchen-ware in the 1960s. The mere association of records with knives and Veg-O-Matics, the idea they are being sold by the same entity is bad enough. Much worse is the lesson that the same sales methods, even down to the frenetic, exclamation-mark-filled script, could be used to great success for The Miracle Brush and top pop hits by everyone from Heart to Elton John to Gloria Gayner. It’s an affront to everything we believed in as record collectors and lovers of music.
So you can dig up some of the lessor known songs here – basically short-run hits from the 70s which haven’t made into a Guardians of the Galaxy movie yet – and listen with a critical ear, trying to fit them into the ill-defined Atrocious Music rubric. I’m talking about such one-hit wonders as
- Imaginary Lover (Atlantic Rhythm Section)
- Thank You For Being a Friend (Andrew Gold)
- Before My Heart Finds Out (Gene Cotton)
- Living Next Door to Alice (Smokie)
- Don't Worry Baby (B.J. Thomas)
- Thunder Island (Jay Ferguson)
- This Time I'm In It For Love (Player)
But, in the end, I don’t particularly recommend it. Even though this list is about half the album, it’s the repackaging, the cheap-looking cover, the fact there is no contribution to the on-going development of new talent in the K-Tel business plan, and the commercials (which you can find at places like this), which really put this side-by-side with Dora Hall, the Silicon Teens, Uri Geller, and the rest of the collection.
I will admit, however, that you cannot beat these prices!