1994 - How could a person like you bring me joy?
Ace of Base, ‘The Sign’
Apparently 1994 was the Year That Punk Broke. Copies of Green Day’s Dookie and The Offspring’s Smash were flying off the shelves in the States, and would quite quickly hit Europe and the UK. But, in my living room at least, 1994 was the Year Europop Broke.
It was either 1993 or 1994 when we got satellite TV installed. Before the internet took hold in the UK, getting a big dish stuck on the side of your house was the last big leap in broadening one’s cultural horizons. I remember lots of 1994 things being advertised on Sky Sports, like the annual edition of the WWF Survivor Series. This pinnacle of sporting prowess had Chuck Norris as the special guest “enforcer” in the Undertaker vs Yokozuna main event. (He didn’t do a whole lot...except kick Jeff ‘the crowd hates you but not because you’re a convincing baddy, just because you’re really annoying and not a very good wrestler’ Jarrett in the face. So it was a big win.)
I also remember adverts on Sky Sports for the 1994/95 Ashes series, and lots of big boxing bouts using The Grid’s banjo-tastic ‘Swamp Thing’ to make the fighters look cool...which it did not do successfully. I was gonna write a whole thing about the overabundance of banjos in the 1994 charts – looking at you, Rednex, and your mate Joe – until I realised I would’ve just been ranting madly for a page and a half. (Really though, what kind of house music producer in the early 1990s in their right mind would...oh, I think I just answered my own question.)
We didn’t get a UK-centric version of MTV until around 1997. Maybe there just weren’t enough satellite viewers for them to bother with until that time. Instead, my impressionable mind was reared on MTV Europe, which meant a little less PJ & Duncan, a little more...whatever the Benelux region’s equivalent of Byker Grove is. Probably.
Over on Nickelodeon, they were doing their bit to usher in the age of Europop as well, courtesy of their Nick Pix. These contained short snippets of the latest music videos sandwiched in between episodes of Rugrats and Clarissa Explains it All. Most memorable for me were in this period were ‘Anything’ by Culture Beat from 1993, and this little gem.
We’d already been treated to ‘All That She Wants’, the single released in May 1993. Being only eight and not well versed in the nuance of pop lyrics, I was in my ‘taking everything literally’ era and wondering how many babies ‘she’ really wanted to have. ‘The Sign’ had been released just about everywhere else already by the time it climbed to Number Two in the United Kingdom in late February 1994. Compared to ‘All That She Wants’, the video for ‘The Sign’ was brighter, the lyrics a little chirpier, and it all felt a bit more upbeat than a song I’d thought was earnest social commentary about overpopulation. (Although apparently, songwriter Jonas Berggren had to make amends to ‘The Sign’ in production as he’d thought it was “too merry” to begin with.)
Listening and looking back now, it’s all actually a bit confused innit. These Swedish stars performing a bit of a reggae-esque slow swinger, all lit up for the video like an American band with too much budget and not enough ideas. But then, Europop always was one of the trickiest sounds to nail down. Or maybe there’s just a lot of stuff gets dragged under its umbrella? Ace of Base, Aqua, Vengaboys – apparently all the same thing. All you need to do is be European and chirpy, apparently. I suppose you never need to look further than the annual Eurovision Song Contest to see what the prevailing mood in pop is across the continent. Even when a rock band wins it, you’re usually treated to a decent dose of pop and dance along the way.
Ace of Base did tend to produce songs a little more sophisticated than your typical Europop fare. I can’t have been the only listener to think ‘Happy Nation’ didn’t sound terribly happy at the time. But pop music being so disposable on a seemingly weekly basis, you don’t tend to examine the sincerity of the delivery. It’s on the radio, on your playlist, on an advert, and then gone again – for the most part. But with Ace of Base it all sounds and feels a little more mature and like there’s still some shelf life. I think that is how the Swedish group have stayed on the radar with songs that (mostly) hold up 30 years on – or at least in my algorithm. It’s the clever combination of catchy music with some hidden depths that helped them to such massive success in the first place.
Also in 1994…
Trent Reznor wants to what me like a what? Nine Inch Nails releases The Downward Spiral, and scenes go missing all over the place during the video for ‘Closer’.
Speaking of sincerity of delivery, one in seven households bought a copy of The Beautiful South’s ‘best of’ album, Carry On Up the Charts. Their lyrics still go way over my head.
Pearl Jam released their difficult second album, Vs., which if nothing else does contain the absolute banger ‘Rearviewmirror’.