Michael Bolton
No, not the Office Space character.
Michael Bolton is a phenomenon of The Nineties. There is no other singer quite like him.
Let's explain. There are many metal bands out there which, despite having what fans would consider decent metal, are known solely for their power ballads by the general public. Michael Bolton got his start as the singer and occasional guitarist in a mostly forgotten metal group called Blackjack, which explains the quality of his voice. However, for his entire solo career, which is most of his known career, Michael Bolton has done nothing but power ballads, with some mid-tempo songs thrown in. What is more, they are almost all Silly Love Songs or Obsession Songs (those types overlap in the popular consciousness).
He did chart well during his peak, and he was more than a One Hit Wonder. He had several top ten albums including two number ones, at least one live DVD concert and a Grammy award.
These days, he is best known on the internet for being found guilty plagiarizing "Love Is a Wonderful Thing" by the Isley Brothers. (Note: if you are writing your own songs, never let your music stray too close to anything published by Motown.)
He also made a cameo, and is a minor plot point, in the infamous Cuba Gooding Jr film Snow Dogs.
Oh, and The Lonely Island recently featured him in one of their videos.
Tropes:
- Carpet of Virility: Shown off in the video for "Said I Loved You But I Lied." His shirt is the shirt that WILL NOT BE BUTTONED!
- Cover Album
- Cover Version: Recorded quite a few covers of old soul songs (for example, his first major hit as an artist was a cover of "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay").
- Detractor Nickname: "No Talent Ass Clown", which arose from the Office Space character of the same name.
- Early Installment Weirdness: Although some people like it better, the AOR, pop-metal style of his earliest albums will no doubt surprise most listeners more familiar with his soft rock material. His really early installments (which came out in the 1970s when he was still going by his birth name, Michael Bolotin) were even weirder, sounding kind of like Joe Cocker.
- Eighties Hair: Kept his mullet well into The Nineties, which earned him some scorn.
- Floating Head Syndrome: More than one of his albums, including Time, Love and Tenderness.
- Greatest Hits Album: The compilation covering his first ten years was the most successful.
- Large Ham: His overly-emotional singing style was notably parodied by Jim Carrey on an episode of In Living Color. He also shows up for that SNL/LonelyIsland video belting out a power chorus in hamtastic fashion.
- Obsession Song
- Power Ballad
- Self Titled Album: His first album (Michael Bolotin) and his third album (Michael Bolton). Thanks to Sequel Displacement, the former (and the album that came after it) are usually forgotten, and the latter is often mistaken for his first album.
- Signature Style
- Silly Love Songs
- Take That Critics: After receiving negative criticism for over-reliance on covers of old Soul songs, Bolton recorded the all-covers album Timeless: The Classics at the height of his fame, sending it number one in the American chart. How successful he was really depends very much on whether you think his covers are any good.