REDNEX – "Cotton Eye Joe"

If I stick to my usual strategy of voting for songs I’ve heard, this will get at least one vote in the Popular ’95 roundup! Unlikely as it may seem, it was one of a confluence of moments in the late 90s that made me interested in checking out old-time Appalachian music, a fairly bottomless well (and if my family has any particular musical roots, they’re there) which I haven’t learned to get sick of yet.

it’s the fiddle that sells this for me – the slightly off key swipes of sound provide a refreshing contrast to the more repetitive vocal refrain, and there’s enough variety going on in other areas (diva, banjo, male backing singers) to make me enjoy listening to it. Repeated listening would probably lead to insanity though.

For some reason I remember this featuring on an episode of Top of the Pops at a time when I rarely watched the programme.

As Auntie Beryl implies, this was responsible for the only Steps song I have any time for, ‘5-6-7-8’, however, I think this is much, much better.

It sounds less like full-on Eurodance, more like an actual appalachian track given a remix (possibly because – and I’ve only recently learned this – it is a folk song given a Eurodance makeover). I particularly like the fiddle/banjo combination on top of the synthesisers. Plus, it doesn’t go on for too long.

I’m pretty sure 12 year old me enjoyed it without ever actually buying a copy, but I think I’ll give it seven.

An interesting note about this record that isn’t really picked up on (understandably perhaps) is that country music is genuinely very, very popular in Scandinavia. So this rather bizarre attempt to meld country with then-modern pop sounds makes a strange kind of sense. It wasn’t just an isolated “Wouldn’t it be funny if…” moment that spawned a worldwide novelty hit.

Rednex have enjoyed a long career which has combined outright novelty records like this and their inevitable Eurovision effort ‘Mama Take Me Home’, with more straightforward and sincere (if still a bit shonky) country songs.

I have a soft spot for their 2000 German megahit Spirit of the Hawk I must say.

http://youtu.be/j0EWM_6w0vA

They last had a Swedish number one as recently as 2008 with ‘Football Is Our Religion’. It’s not one of their best.

http://youtu.be/m9vbPXm2Wj8

As Tom’s final paragraph indicates, it’s pretty hard to draw a principled line between this and all the other naive dance stuff that’s been well-reviewed around here (Whigfield, Doop, and on and on). A pox (3 or 4 or 5 out of 10) on the lot of ’em I say. Feb 1995 was when I bought my first Alison Krauss record, the Now That I Found You compilation on release because I happened to hear this 1992 track from it on the radio. Bluegrass pop FTW, Rednex not so much (or at least not without serious amounts of alcohol).

The only positive thing I can find to say about this is that it’s only marginally worse than the cosmetic C&W that the likes of Garth Brooks and Shania Twain became very wealthy on during the nineties, but then that don’t impress me much.

I thought the line-dancing craze started off with Billy Ray Cyrus in 1992?

Delurking from America here. I actually like this, although I can understand why others don’t. Reached #25 in the US, which doesn’t sound impressive, but then most of the number ones of the previous year didn’t chart over here at all. The video actually made it into regular rotation on the country TV channel for a while although I don’t it got played much (or at all) on actual country radio.
I’m curious what Tom’s son thinks of this – a close friend of mine recently downloaded this on a whim, and as a result it’s improbably become one of my 4 year old godson’s favorite songs.

Few musical revolutionaries give real heed to the unheeded consequences of their actions. Most prefer a continuous state of revolution with new outrages and innovations, not necessarily in that order, occurring ideally every nanosecond; but in practice what happens is that the sound and style of the revolutionary music are gradually assimilated into the mainstream, in time becoming entirely divorced from the spark of rebellion which initially set it off. Thus when McLaren invented the Sex Pistols he didn’t think that he’d be responsible for the Subs, Rejects or Upstarts half a decade later; and likewise when he harnessed together hip hop and barn dances in “Buffalo Gals” he must have known that at least one road would lead to things like “Cotton Eye Joe.” Another “Doop”-type Eurodance novelty, but this time from Sweden and setting the ancient hillbilly tune against the kind of setting we’ve now come to expect, with trusty fiddle and crowd whoops alike trampled by the unilateral, inescapable beat and the equally obligatory cod-soul female vocal interlude with built-in linguistic Euroslip (“But all he had come for was having some fun”), this is the type of number one which could easily lead to my feeling prematurely old; while I fully understand the atmosphere it would lend to a drunken post-New Year get-together, there is again nothing for me to cling onto, no real sense of change or genuine newness or even nowness. So Rednex may have proved that after all you do need the attitude, the manifesto, for pop – even “mindless” pop of this nature – to work; but otherwise they mark an inauspicious start to a year which, in terms of number ones, might be one of the most confounding to tackle.

Speakin’ of country, I can recommend Caitlin Rose’s new record, The Stand-In. One of its best songs, I Was Cruel, is a good gateway to the Stone Poneys/Ronstadt vibe of a lot of the album (if that doesn’t sound like your cup of tea then this won’t be) and can be freely downloaded here (spin.com even had it as a freebie in cd quality). Rose does momentarily hit the U2/Coldplay button near the end of the record, but her voice is so charming and the bass is so in-the-pocket that even *that* ends up being a blast.

I like “unilateral beat”.

We’re technoing up this country song, with or without the UN’s permission!

@26 Frankie certainly got rich on it, but surely weren’t the first. (As Vanilla Ice did so later, they certainly weren’t the worst, either). It seems (at least now) like such an obvious formula: give the kids something they like, then give them some more, then show they aren’t a one trick pony.

Someone with more instant recall of 70s or 60s pop music could give a quicker response, but from pre-Frankie 80s – and at entirely the opposite end of the quality, charisma and creativity spectrum from Rednex, let alone Vanilla Ice, in the realm of pop genius in fact, I nominate the Associates. Not that “18 Carat Love Affair” is exactly a conventional ballad (although their take on “Love Hangover” on the AA side could more or less qualify – as well as raising the “cover version as 3rd single” convention), but it certainly considerably less banging than the two breathlessly brilliant singles that preceded it.

…although of course they were only the Associates’ first hit singles, not their debut releases…

This is insane. The nineties’ answer to the mad old small-town drunk who stumbles into any given pub and makes up fictional war stories. Quite oddly endearing in that way.

There’s something of outrageous sacrilege in an act from (allegedly) liberal, progressive Sweden dressing up as unreconstructed sugar-rush Dingles by way of the Confederacy, thinking of Ace of Base’s own struggles with heritages of hate, but if they’d sell their soul for a tacky song like the ones they hear on the radio (!), best to go out with a bang rather than a whimper. Charmingly shameless. I don’t think anyone has ever listened to this more than five times in a row and not been permanently sectioned, mind.

6.

Yeah I remember hearing this quite often in the States that year, despite it not charting that high. Maybe my ear was in a different ground at age 11, but I remember “Scatman” (don’t worry, no bunny here) distinctly, even though it charted even lower.

Nowadays it seems to have mutated into a “Jock Jam” and I hear it quite often at sporting events. But despite all that, I loved it in 1995, and cannot bring myself to hate it now.

Patrick Mexico, seconded on “Get Ready for This”….for a while that was the most ubiquitous of the Jock Jams. I can’t imagine it without the sampled “let’s get ready to rumbllllllllle” in the beginning. Although, I did hear “No Limit” often at those events…that’s also 2 Unlimited I believe?

Dunno about reverence, but there’s nothing quite like the experience of listening to this and Terry Callier’s version back to back.

I assume that Twitter will be blowing up on this, but just in case someone hasn’t heard, Daft Punk’s whole new album (not individual tracks) is streaming on the iTunes store. 3 tracks in and it’s very slick and fun (I’ve been lukewarm on ‘Get Lucky’ but it appears that it’s going to be improved by the clever album concept).

OK, first time through Random Access Memories is fun and interesting, but overall feels just a little wrapped up in its own sonic perfectionism (RAM *sounds* beautiful – really smooth and uncompressed compared to most dance music these days) at the expense of making the best conceivable pop music (Off The Wall is an obvious point of reference for RAM, but OTW was just over 40 mins whereas RAM is over 70…). Nothing drags exactly, but some of the noodling smacks of audio-phile/studio-nerdiness, about which it’s hard to have unmixed feelings I find.

Anyone else got any first impressions to share?

@42, Tom. There are a lot of dismissive, corruscating initial responses (including avowals of disinclination to give a second listen, etc.) being posted at The Guardian, suggesting that a lot of fans may have set their expectations a little high. 2013 is turning out to be quite the year for returning musical heroes (MBV, Bowie, DP, PSBs) to alternately thrill and/or perturb their bases!

I love Daft Punk but I always thought the last track on Discovery was a perfect manifesto song for them. It lasts ten minutes and its title is “Too Long”.

@46, Mark. How is that new Wire album anyway? I recall a very positive Guardian review of a gig that sounded quite proggy (30 guitarists?) that they did back in March to support the album, but haven’t heard/seen anything since then.

Other 2013 returning heroes? How about McCartney playing with remnants of Nirvana (I liked it). Still hear murmurs about The Sundays maybe releasing something later this year…

@48, MarkG. Nice, I look forward to hearing it. I must say that I haven’t found myself listening to mbv’s album much. Maybe I overdid it listening to it almost constantly that first week? My most recent purchase is Vampire Weekend’s new album… and it’s not really doing much for me. I dug a lot of the new songs when I watched the live stream of VW from Coachella, hence my purchase, but the versions on the record seem underdone (and not in a good way) by comparison. Caitlin Rose’s record (see #23 above) and, ahem, Foals’ Holy Fire are the recent things I’ve most enjoyed and continue to play lots.