YouTube
Ever watched a video and found yourself wondering whether the people who made it thought it was good? That's sort of the feeling I get from these Canadians - it's very hard to tell whether they're being really self-important (Ivan Doroschuk's doomy vocal, the fact that he's written a whole song about dancing instead of just, y'know, dancing) or being consciously silly in an attempt to write a hit.
Oddly enough, I have no memory of hearing this song at the time, but I've come to know it since, although I still don't really understand it. In fact, I don't even know whether there's anything to understand.
What I can tell, though, is that this wasn't just a huge international hit, but one that caught the public imagination sufficiently to continue being alluded to and parodied to this day, which seems like a nice nest-egg for them. Of course, to some extent that was at the expense of anybody taking them seriously enough to sustain major long-term success, although they did have another hit in some places ('Pop Goes The World' - but not this part of it, evidently). It's catchy enough though, I'll give them that. It seems to fall a bit between two stools for me, though, and certainly seems like the sort of hit that would become annoying if you heard it a lot at any given time.
I wonder whether Ace Of Base had heard this before they wrote 'All That She Wants'?
Available on: The Edge of the Eighties
[compilation]
