{"id":796737,"date":"2019-06-13T10:08:04","date_gmt":"2019-06-13T16:08:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/?p=847752"},"modified":"2019-06-13T10:08:04","modified_gmt":"2019-06-13T16:08:04","slug":"flashback-bette-midler-takes-wind-beneath-my-wings-to-number-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/music-news\/flashback-bette-midler-takes-wind-beneath-my-wings-to-number-one\/","title":{"rendered":"Flashback: Bette Midler Takes \u2018Wind Beneath My Wings\u2019 to Number One"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Donald Trump<\/a> was in Europe last week to commemorate the 75th anniversary of D-Day when he decided it was the perfect time to lob an attack at Bette Midler<\/a>. \u201cWashed up psycho @BetteMidler was forced to apologize for a statement she attributed to me that turned out to be totally fabricated by her in order to make \u2018your great president\u2019 look really bad,\u201d he wrote<\/a> despite being a sitting U.S. president. \u201cShe got caught, just like the Fake News Media gets caught. A sick scammer!\u201d<\/p>\n

Midler responded with a tweet<\/a> that evoked her 1993 film Hocus Pocus<\/em> where she\u2019s standing over Trump with Kathy Griffin and Stormy Daniels by her side. \u201cThe witches are back,\u201d she wrote. \u201cAnd there\u2019s hell to pay!\u201d<\/p>\n

Their surreal Twitter war drew attention away from the fact that this week is the 30th anniversary of Midler\u2019s classic \u201cWind Beneath My Wings\u201d hitting Number One. The song was the biggest hit of her carer and won Record of the Year and Song of the Year at the 1990 Grammy Awards. More importantly, she sang it to Krusty the Clown on The Simpsons<\/em> in the classic 1993 episode \u201cKrusty Gets Cancelled.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWind Beneath My Wings\u201d was written in 1982 by the songwriting duo of Jeff Silbar and Larry Henley. It was first released by Roger Whittaker on his 1982 LP Wind Beneath My Wings<\/em> and then everyone from Lou Rawls to Gladys Knight and the Pips tackled it. But the song found its biggest audience in 1989 when it appeared in the movies Beaches,<\/em> a tearjerker starring Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey. Midler and Hershey play childhood best friends that have a turbulent relationship in their adult years, especially when Midler becomes a successful pop star. They reconnect when Hershey \u2014 now a single mother \u2014 finds out that she\u2019s dying of a heart disease. She leaves her daughter in the custody of Midler, who sings \u201cWind Beneath My Wings\u201d after the funeral.<\/p>\n

The song wasn\u2019t written for this movie, and when you read the lyrics, they come off as a little bizarre when you consider they\u2019re being delivered to a dear friend after a funeral. The first lines are \u201cIt must have been cold there in my shadow\/To never have sunlight on your face\u201d and things only get worse from there. The narrator does declare that her friend is her hero, but the central analogy is that she herself is an eagle and the friend is merely the \u201cwind beneath\u201d her wings forced to live forever in her cold shadow.<\/p>\n

Imagine being in the afterlife and looking down on Earth and seeing that your best friend is singing about how she\u2019s a soaring eagle and you were merely the wind that allowed her to fly. You\u2019d be justified in being like, \u201cExcuse me? My body is still warm and you\u2019re singing a song about saying sole purpose on Earth was to allow you to shine? This whole song is about you. I am literally invisible in your crazy metaphor.\u201d<\/p>\n

None of this is Midler\u2019s fault and she sings the hell out of the song. Trump may consider her a \u201cwashed up psycho\u201d but she\u2019s still making movies and playing enormous concerts. Maybe the psycho is the person who feels the leader of the free world should spend his time attacking her on Twitter.<\/p>\n

via:: Rolling Stone<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Donald Trump was in Europe last week to commemorate the 75th anniversary of D-Day when he decided it was the perfect time to lob an attack at Bette Midler. \u201cWashed up psycho @BetteMidler was forced to apologize for a statement she attributed to me that turned out to be totally fabricated by her in order […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[98],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-796737","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-music-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-19 14:01:30","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSMT The Mountain","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/796737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=796737"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/796737\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=796737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=796737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=796737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}