Ace of Base to Aerosmith

Ace of Base
There's a simple formula for going nine times platinum with your American debut: Scandinavian melancholy, phone sex vocals, and the R&B demo track on the Casio repeated ad infinitum. But Ace of Base were less the second coming of ABBA than the genesis of big-time Europop built entirely around the sturdy upbeat music/downbeat lyrics dichotomy.

Exhibit A: The aforementioned debut was originally titled Happy Nation before it changed to The Sign for the U.S. release to capture on the massive success of the title track. Only Eiffel 65's Europop adheres more slavishly to the statute of truth in advertising (just imagine a Nirvana album called Disaffected Sounds of Young People from the Pacific Northwest).

Exhibit B: The singles "All That She Wants" and "Don't Turn Around," two morose tales of heartbreak with nearly identical song structures but told from two different perspectives. Just change a few lyrics and you've gone from jilter to jiltee.

Exhibit C: "Beautiful Life" is a corny stab at uplift tailor-made for a terribly green-screened video. Drew Carey weeps.


Whee! We're flying!

But just as I was ready to indict Ace of Base for everything from Aqua to Zombie Nation, I dropped the needle on "The Sign" and remembered why they have lifetime amnesty. Here, the optimism works since it's actually a giant kiss-off, and they start the listener out about as low as you can possibly go (first lines don't get much more depressing than "Why?/Why do I bother?") then work hard to bring you back up in that brilliant chorus. It's a shiny comet of pop perfection that takes me right back to the roller rink.




Adam and the Ants
"White hip-hop" was a curious idiom that didn't survive rap's first halting steps into the mainstream in the early 1980s, which makes "Ant Rap" more fascinating as an historical document than an actual song, as it is pure nonsense. Nobody has the balls to refer to his "four men" doing "that rapping thing" anymore. It is a moment to be preserved, if only to show just how elastic hip-hop can be.

Experiments aside, Adam and the Ants are a great example of the '80s band that was always interesting to look at and occasionally interesting to listen to. "Stand and Deliver" is their de facto calling card, a little glam Western about a bunch of cheeky fops-slash-highwaymen stealing our attention away from the talented and slovenly, huzzah.

"Kings of the Wild Frontier" is all about drums and comparing your fanbase to an oppressed ethnic group. "Antpeople," I reckon, were no less oppressed than Parrotheads. But did I mention how sweet those drums are?




Aerosmith
I wonder what happened to the old Aerosmith, the straight-up boogie woogie New England bar band of the type that Boston wrote about but could never actually be with all their synths and spaceships and falsettos. This is the Aerosmith that wrote the epically dirty "Back in the Saddle" and the epically epic "Sweet Emotion" and "Dream On" (sorry, Eminem, not even you can ruin that one). This is the Aerosmith that came up with "Walk This Way," a song so ludicrously hickabilly that Run-DMC considered re-working as it joke until they saw a way to make piles of money from it. I should note that I have only the original version and not the collabo - there's nothing revolutionary about yelling each rhyming word at the top of their lungs, then acting like it's the musical equivalent of de Klerk freeing Mandela.

"Train Kept A Rollin'" also fits into the above style but not the rant.

After that Aerosmith imploded due to the usual litany of rock 'n roll vices, Aerosmith 2.0 rose from its ashes, a jovial collection of kooky uncles with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of songwriting gimmicks. This is not entirely a criticism. I have soft spots for the barely-clever wordplay of "Love In An Elevator" and the inexplicable oddness of "Pink"; the softest spot, however, is reserved for "Dude (Looks Like A Lady)" which for many years I believed was written specifically for the movie Mrs. Doubtfire. I am smarter now and am well aware that it's about transgender love. There's also the rumor that it was inspired by Steven Tyler meeting the members of Motley Crue which, if it's true, is totally heroic. WHA KA KA KA KOW!



I'm surprised that while I don't have some of the better singles like "Living on the Edge" or "Crazy," I do have "Janie's Got A Gun" - it's kind of taboo to slam due to its subject matter but I have a major beef with those pan pipes and the heinous overproduction all around.

And we can't forget the song from Armageddon, laying aside the cock rock long enough to do some avant-garde screeching over a full symphony orchestra. Without it, nobody would take the plot of the film seriously.