In “Undercover Angel,” the narrator is going to bed sad - “crying on my pillow, lonely in my bed” - when a vision appears to him. Eventually, she uses previously-undiscovered godlike powers to make her attempted-rapist neighbor disappear into her radio waves, transforming him into a ghost and then summoning him back up whenever she wants him. Three years before he hit #1 with “Undercover Angel,” Alan O’Day wrote another #1 single: Helen Reddy’s “ Angie Baby.” In that song, the title character is a mentally ill girl who shuts out reality, living in the pure fantasy realm of the songs on her radio. She’s “a dream who makes sweet love” - a genie, maybe, or a hallucination.
And she’s not, as far as we know, an actual winged godly being. The angel is undercover because she’s under sheets, having sex. “Undercover Angel” is, however, about as weird, and about as stupid, as that absolutely inane hypothetical thing that I just described. All of those things might have been interesting.
Undercover angel movie series#
“Undercover Angel” does not end with a series of double-crosses, tearful confessions, and shootouts. The angel is not seduced by the tightknit community of devils or mafia goons, and the angel does not come to regard them as family. There’s no scene in the song where an angel has to go to her captain (God, I guess?) and complain that she’s in too deep and she’s losing her sense of self.
Sorry to disappoint, but “Undercover Angel” is not a story-song about a seraphim who infiltrates a devious ring of devils or mafia goons or whatever. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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