August 02, 2009
no walls only the bridge (chapter four excerpt)
sugarhigh! will be posting excerpts from this book over the next several months
Like most of the great one-hit wonders, Deee-Lite had more than one hit: the band reached the top of the Hot Dance/Club Play charts five times. And yet, “Groove Is in the Heart” appears on the compilation called The Best One Hit Wonders In the World Ever.
As is often the case, the “one hit” is the band’s first; the following songs might be reckoned to have charted in part via momentum rather than their own deserving qualities. Given the number of exceptions, this cannot be an entirely satisfying account. An alternate (but not exclusive) explanation holds that the song is best remembered that can capture, store, and sell forward the feeling of the times; the distillation of singles down to single is in part a collusion between market and mnemonics. Cultural memory removes bad data: engaged in the operation of crafting a coherent image of an era, it is another name for ideology itself. “One-hit wonders” offer a peculiarly direct image of ideological action.
None of this is to say that “Groove Is in the Heart” is somehow a perjured song, aesthetic complicity with a beat. It is witty and original, genially madcap with lots going on — a soothingly surreal vacation on the dance floor. The song’s ideological kernel is most intelligibly described as post-competitive. Such a sensation is more unusual than it may first appear: by the time one encounters a single within the media space of mass culture, the song is already charged with competition. Having entered the arena of the Hot 100 (an abstract market space nonetheless located in the United States), the height of its climb is always at stake. This drama is intrinsic not to the song, exactly, but to the experience of the song. This is part of what’s meant by the suggestion that pop is always the dominant; songs confront each other as combatants, and to become truly pop is already to have bested a host of songs heard and unheard.
Inseparable from this is the expectation of a single’s fall — often more precipitous than its ascent, in keeping with the common understanding of pop music as something which exhausts its secrets (if it has any to its name) easily and entirely. Thus the dreamy universality of the pop song is always at odds with its fate as a cultural commodity, disposable as it is consumable, destined for its paradoxical fate on classic hits radio: oh yeah, remember when that song was timeless?
Such a tension is part of pop’s nature. The rare song that seems for a time to escape from the iron law, that endures as a hit for an improbable span, acquires a mythic sense in accord with having seemingly transcended the gravity of pop itself. The sublimity of “Groove Is in the Heart” lies in its mythic endurance, but also in the extent to which the song matched this market affect with its own, a song of such flirtatious unconcern musically and lyrically that it felt only reasonable it should elude the tensions of competition, float free — for a while — from the narrative rise and fall of the pop single...