Bonnie Tyler, singer of Total Eclipse of the Heart, dies aged 75

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ttheanonymousone about 4 hours ago 62 commentsRead Article on bbc.com

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Discussion (62 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

japhyr•36 minutes ago

Growing up in the 80s, I've known (and sung) this song all my life. But I just saw this flowchart for the first time today:

https://jeannr.tumblr.com/post/165291081/i-made-a-flow-chart...

I believe that's the original source, but it looks cut off. Here's a full version:

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b1/82/dc/b182dcc291495c013c98...

IAmGraydon•14 minutes ago

That's actually a really interesting visualization of a professionally structured verse.

parkersweb•about 2 hours ago

I once worked with a guy mixing TV programmes and live DVDs; I knew he’d been a studio engineer at one point in his career. We were re-arranging our studios one day and as I picked up a pair of NS-10s he casually said “I mixed ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ on those…”

IAmGraydon•23 minutes ago

Did he mean on a set of NS10s or on THOSE NS10s?

auslegung•about 2 hours ago

Literal music video of Total Eclipse, one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsgWUq0fdKk

RIP Ms Tyler, you will be missed

chasd00•about 1 hour ago

That is so great. My wife and i love to annoy our teenage kids by getting Alexa to play this song and then singing along very dramatically haha.

petercooper•about 1 hour ago

Back in 1999, the UK had its first total solar eclipse for several decades and VH1 played the music video (though, not this one ;-)) on loop for an hour while it was happening.

nostrademons•about 1 hour ago

If you like meta-songs, you may be interested in "Title of this song" by Da Vinci's Notebook:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgmUgFEFzco&list=RDHgmUgFEFz...

defrost•about 1 hour ago

The back story of the writing of Total Eclipse ain't bad either: https://youtu.be/LGqYnj_Y3CI?t=70

funnybeam•about 2 hours ago

I like to pretend that was filmed in the Hogwarts sixth form commmon room in the eighties

amiga386•about 1 hour ago

It pretty much was. It was filmed in a Victorian sanitorium, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holloway_Sanatorium (built 1873-1885) which is in keeping with your (and JK Rowling's) vision of public schools, in particular Hogwarts was modelled on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fettes_College (built 1864-1870) in a similar architectural style.

imzadi•37 minutes ago

Sony tried so hard to kill this when it was new

Decabytes•about 1 hour ago

I had never seen the music video until the news started playing it. Super funny

pavlov•about 2 hours ago

There’s also one of A-Ha’s “Take on Me”.

“Haaaand comes out…”

loloquwowndueo•34 minutes ago

Nowhere near as good though.

amiga386•14 minutes ago

I think Bad Apple the literal version compares well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReblZ7o7lu4

wigster•35 minutes ago

I went to the Reading Rock Festival back in the 80s. she was viewed very much as middle of the road and when she came on, got roundly booed and many bottles of nefarious liquids were tossed at her and the band.

she and they were total pros, shrugged it off, she hurled some abuse back and within a couple of songs had the crowd eating out of the palm of her hand.

RIP Bonnie. A class act.

urbsgpw•about 2 hours ago

My mum had a cassette with some of her songs. We'd have it on for long trips. I loved the long version of Faster than the speed of night. it's basically just "carpe diem" in a different format, but i loved her voice and the slight melancholy and almost call to action that the song brought with it. Also, the video (of the shorter version) is peak 80's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm4CgwRxw3Y

petcat•about 1 hour ago

Jim Steinman, Meat Loaf, and now Bonnie Tyler. It truly all has come to an end. I think Celine Dion is the last one still carrying on Steinman's legacy.

codelikeawolf•about 1 hour ago

Ugh, what a bummer. I'll be listening to Holding Out for a Hero on repeat today. Nothing gold can stay.

madcaptenor•32 minutes ago

"Strong Songs" podcast breaking down Total Eclipse of The Heart: https://strongsongspodcast.com/blogs/episodes/s07e06-total-e...

toomuchtodo•6 minutes ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonnie_Tyler

vardump•about 1 hour ago

Little by little, memories of the 1980s fade.

goda90•31 minutes ago

"Every now and then, I get a little bit nervous That the best of all the years have gone by"

WillAdams•about 1 hour ago

Sadly, Jim Steinman passed away half a decade ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Steinman

I still want to see the dream realized on Broadway of a Native-American inspired musical.

al_borland•about 1 hour ago

The version from the wedding band in Old School will forever be in my mind.

https://youtu.be/FfUU1wJKXDc

SideburnsOfDoom•about 2 hours ago

And let us not forget "Holding Out For a Hero"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWcASV2sey0

JodieBenitez•6 minutes ago

Jellybean long version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4Wq3U86SyQ

myself248•about 1 hour ago

Featured towards the climax of Short Circuit 2, which was huge in my childhood. What a powerhouse piece of music!

nly•about 1 hour ago

I think of that movie every time I hear the song! That was one badass robot sequence.

"Suuuuure. Kidnap the humans, DESTROY THE MACHINE."

misnome•about 1 hour ago

Yes, I will never fail to associate this music with Short Circuit 2, it is also burned into my childhood memory.

biofox•about 1 hour ago

"Number 5 is alive!"

slowin•24 minutes ago

Absolute classic. If anyone is interested, the Footloose soundtrack (which has Holding Out For a Hero on it) is probably one of the greatest soundtracks of all time. The movie sucks but damn, this soundtrack is incredible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footloose_(1984_soundtrack)

limbicsystem•about 1 hour ago

Is it wrong that I prefer the Shrek version?

amiga386•about 1 hour ago

It's not. I prefer the bardcore version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx-x_1lIXh4

Rayhem•about 1 hour ago

Fun fact: the original was only produced in English but the Shrek remix (which is a *BOP*) got translated into every language the movie did.

nisiddharth•about 2 hours ago

Where have all the good men gone and where are all the gods?

AndrewOMartin•about 1 hour ago

Is it too much to ask for a Streetwise Hercules?

senko•28 minutes ago

'fraid so, the odds have risen too high.

We might need a white night on a fiery steed. One can dream.

deadbabe•about 1 hour ago

Too soon, she could have had a lot more life left to live these days, but a bad surgery ended it. Sucks. Try to avoid needing surgery as much as you can.

PurpleRamen•about 1 hour ago

RIP legend.

I'm curious now when this was announced. Yesterday, out of nowhere, TikTok showed me a video about someone praising "Total Eclipse of the Heart", despite not having this bubble in my profile. Kinda spooky to see the news now.

derwiki•13 minutes ago

Probably one of those coincidences, like you talked about bouncy houses and now you’re seeing ads for bouncy houses

alex1138•about 2 hours ago

Wow. Holy crap.

Edit: guys, I get that it's not a "substantive comment" but there's no excuse for 3 downvotes. Get a life

JodieBenitez•4 minutes ago

There, got my upvote.

cramer4next•about 1 hour ago

How is this hacker news worthy? Never heard of her or the song. Is from a time when people carried boomboxes on their shoulders?

nostrademons•about 1 hour ago

Before that. Her breakthrough album was 1977 and Total Eclipse of the Heart came out in 1982, so it was more the 8-track era. It remained a staple of radio plays (remember those?) through the 80s and 90s though, and was remade by Nikki French into a chart-topping dance version in 1995.

A lot of HN is folks in their late 30s, 40s, and early 50s (and sometimes even older!), so many folks here would've overlapped with the radio era. A lot of folks here were involved in making YouTube/Instagram/TikTok, not listening to it.

masfuerte•about 1 hour ago

I'm old enough to remember Walkmans coming out in 1979, which was the start of the end of the boombox era. Approximately no-one was using 8-track at that point.

runako•about 1 hour ago

I'm not quite that old, but didn't people look down on cassettes due to their lower audio quality? Weren't most home systems (hi-fis) still vinyl or 8-track for a while longer?

PurpleRamen•about 1 hour ago

Death notices of famous artists are regularly on HN. If people upvote it, it should be worthy.

krapp•about 1 hour ago

That's not how it works. If upvotes alone mattered, HN would quickly degenerate into Reddit. The bar is whether "good hackers" would find this interesting.

Death notices of famous artists are the definition of off-topic: "most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." If normies care about it, good hackers by definition probably don't.

I flag this and every such thread I come across. If Hacker News is going to be consistent in its espoused principles, this is non-technical content and thus not welcome. If that standard applies to far more substantive stories regardless of the quality of conversation they produce, it must apply here as well.

PurpleRamen•38 minutes ago

> If upvotes alone mattered

I did not say upvotes alone matter, but they should be the final say after all other mechanisms.

> The bar is whether "good hackers" would find this interesting.

If this were true, the majority of frontpage-entries would have to be removed.

> "most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities,[..]If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

I guess the notable point here is "most" and "probably". The exception seems to be always news which are so important or dramatic that they are still not removed, and leaving the final decision to the upvotes. Which is why there are also regularly political and sometime seven sports entries (once or twice a year).

Despite being called hacker news, reality is not binary and rules should not be handled like that.

xnorswap•about 1 hour ago

I do think HN should have an obit: category and filter them out the main page.

It's one thing to have obits for people who wouldn't be covered by regular news, but "75 year old celebrity dies" is not any kind of new phenomenon.

It generates a decent amount of upvotes and discussion based on name recognition and nostalgia, but every thread is essentially the same, "Oh, that's sad, I liked their work, <personal anecdote of how they were touched by it>.".

toomuchtodo•4 minutes ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48614633

> Anything that gratifies intellectual curiosity is on topic for HN! - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html That doesn't mean it has to gratify your curiosity or mine - no single article can do that for everyone. But it's clear that that's what makes the article on topic.

> One other aspect: the best HN submissions are the ones that are most uncorrelated with anything else that's gotten attention recently - or, as I used to put it, can't be predicted from any existing sequence*. This one has that property for sure!

(there is a "hide" link for threads not of interest, I strongly encourage it's use to optimize your forum participation experience)

budsniffer952•6 minutes ago

>The bar is whether "good hackers" would find this interesting.

Who put you in charge of what other people find interesting?

Get over yourself, loser.

sverhagen•about 1 hour ago

Maybe it's not.

Guidelines:

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, (...) If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

swader999•about 1 hour ago

Every now and then an article like this is fine.

awnird•33 minutes ago

The core audience here is elderly American racists, so white people from the 80s dying makes the front page all the time.

tekla•about 1 hour ago

Very famous singer, multiple very famous songs, 40 yo song topped the carts during the 2024 Eclipse, was pretty much the theme song for a very small indie movie called Shrek 2.

asimovDev•31 minutes ago

I think Shrek would be pro open source software and hardware if he knew what it was, so this makes it HN worthy