First Hit #1: April 15, 1989
Did you kind of like Sledgehammer but feel it needed less sax and more falsetto? Well then Fine Young Cannibals have the song for you! That’s not completely fair, the only similarity is really the distinct guitar lick, but it owes a debt to other pop music as well, and the song as a whole is one of those songs that keep reminding you of other songs. It arranges the components of all the bands influences into something that feels almost original, but not quite, as all the components are recognizable and the feel of the song is still largely cribbed from somewhere else. Then again, unless you intend to listen to all the songs at once, which is going to sound closer to Metal Machine Music than a pop tune if you attempt it, this is an enjoyable meld of different influences.
Goofy video to go with his goofy falsetto; never saw that one before. Dolly Parton covered this recently, with similar instrumentation except a fiddle sawing over the top, and a hoedown finale. The chord progression is I-IV-vi-V over and over for both verse and chorus, a very slight variation from the I-V-vi-IV and I-iv-IV-V we’ve been seeing recently.
As with “Straight Up,” a heavily distorted guitar (not at the very beginning of the song, but thereafter) is enlisted in the service of a drum-driven dance tune. It’s almost as if the hair metal sound has run its course and been domesticated, which inevitably means that a different sort of “dangerous-sounding hard rock” is just around the corner. Wonder what that could be…