Last week, I labeled A Flock of Seagulls, when referencing what I think to have been their greatest pop achievement, as possibly the "most mocked" of all the synth-pop acts of the Second British Invasion. Well, that may require some qualification. Because in late June 40 years ago, "The Safety Dance"--a synth-pop confection that probably no one has ever taken seriously as a work of musical artistry, and which yet has achieved a kind of infectious meme-ability of what can only be called world-historical proportions--started its climb up the American Billboard charts.
Men Without Hats was essentially a half-American, half-Canadian family band from Quebec, which went through a punk phase before shifting to New Wave in the very early 1980s, embracing synthesized keyboards and a musical aesthetic which was crowding disco out of the clubs in cosmopolitan Montreal at a time when, outside of a few venues in NYC and LA, it basically had no presence across the border. (The song itself technically reflects upon that early transition, since rather than sex, the lyrics are actually about the early progenitors of slamdancing and other post-punk styles mixing it up with those attempting to maintain disco's dominance in dance halls.) The song had such a long, ironically-but-kind-of-actually-beloved half-life that it wasn't unusual, by the mid-1980s, to sometimes here the extended dance version on ordinary pop radio, in the same way that, 10 or 20 years after that, it wasn't entirely surprising to see it referenced on Scrubs and South Park. I suppose it's the sort of tune which someone, somewhere, has surely referred to as a "postmodern masterpiece" (Google gives me nothing when I do that search, but I still believe). In any case, two things I can say with complete assurance: first, Renaissance Faires were never the same after the single's video; and second, "Pop Goes the World," from five years later, is their better song [ducks].
