Men Without Hats -- The Safety Dance

 

Happy Canada Day and all that! I'm hoping that my fellow Canadian viewers of KKP are enjoying their July 1st from coast to coast to coast. Of course, being a statutory holiday today means that I've got a special round of Reminiscings of Youth.

This all starts with my regular bus ride to high school all the way back in 1982. One of my classmates hopped onto the TTC and saw me. We often commuted together and he always nattered on something irrelevant like one of those "Seinfeld" side characters. This time around, he asked me whether I had ever heard of this song called "The Safety Dance" and proceeded to speak out the first verse:

We can dance if we want to

We can leave your friends behind

'Cause your friends don't dance

And if they don't dance

Well they're no friends of mine

He was rather obsessed about those lyrics as I recall. Anyways, it was some time later when this Montreal-based band called Men Without Hats who had recorded "The Safety Dance" showed off their music video.

In the years to come, whenever I have seen the video, I always wondered whether my university's Society for Creative Anachronism had anything to do with it. Anyways, this was Men Without Hats' 2nd single released sometime in that year of 1982 and at the time, I wasn't all that impressed with it. I guess I was no friend of theirs.

But then as I got more into extended remixes and began hearing them on Saturday night radio broadcasts, I realized that the remix version of "The Safety Dance" sounded pretty good with the focus on the underlying rhythm, the famous bleeping riff (I'm not trying to be profane here) and the singers spelling out "SAFETY". After that, I became a convert to the cause. America became even more of a convert than Canada did in its initial release, since Billboard recorded it reaching No. 3 while in Canada, it didn't even crack the Top 10...it just scraped by at No. 11.

"The Safety Dance" is also one of the best pop culture examples of turning a negative into a positive. Songwriter and singer Ivan Doroschuk had apparently been ousted from a dance club for doing some pogoing or slam dancing one time which he felt was rather unfair. So, in what would perhaps be a form of revenge and therapy, he created "The Safety Dance". As a personal aside, a bunch of us tried some pogoing at a university dance. The results were unfortunately mixed and painful...especially when I jumped in to move my weight around. But in any case, Doroschuk's creation became his band's most famous song...something whose popularity and fame has continued right to this day.

It's been given the affectionate mention in cartoons on either side of the Pacific.

There was even a Men Without Hats conversation channel on Conan!

Heck, even movie and TV dance compilation videos have used it. "The Safety Dance" may have become the most famous Canadian song to be utilized on social media. Wouldn't it be nice if the song got some coast-to-coast-to-coast tributes tonight?

In any case, since I couldn't find out in which month "The Safety Dance" was released, let's just go with July 1982 to find out some of the singles that were released back then.

Aming -- Matsu wa (待つわ）

Hidemi Ishikawa -- Yu-re-te Shonan（ゆ・れ・て湘南）

Akio Kayama -- Hisame （氷雨）

Never Gonna Let You Go produced by Sergio Mendes

Geez...sorry Mr. Mendes.

This morning, I did something that I hadn't done in 37 years. No...not that, my bladder is still as tight as a kettle drum. Actually, I am referring to the fact that I painted fences for the first time since the summer of 1983 since our superintendent sent around a flyer asking residents to handle the painting of their area fences over the weekend. So I went to the superintendent's office yesterday morning to pick up the stain, the brush and the stir stick and waited until this morning to get started because yesterday was a meteorological washout. Today, however, is a fine day so I got out after breakfast and did Part 1 of the job in about an hour. It was rather nice to be doing something outside of translating, teaching or blogging for a change.

As I said, the summer of 1983 was the time for me to earn my first amount of money in a summer job, so I got to paint a whole ton of fences during July and August for a particular townhouse area in Agincourt in the northeastern part of Toronto. I also had to pick up garbage and water the lawns in what was a pretty hot summer. Ended up with the worst case of athlete's foot but all in all, it was good honest work to earn some money for university.

It was also a somewhat eerie experience because for most of my days there, I swore that I thought I was the only person anywhere in the development. I gather that most of the adults were off at work and the kids were off to summer camp. Whenever I needed more paint, I would leave a message for my boss, and by the next morning, the paint would be there without me ever meeting the delivery person.

However having said that, at one point, there was one townhouse resident who apparently had his/her radio on fairly loudly and it was playing all sorts of pop music. The one song that I remember distinctly was "Never Gonna Let You Go" that had been produced by Sergio Mendes as an April 1983 single and was also included on his self-titled album that came out the same time. It was created by Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann and sung by Joe Pizzulo and Leeza Miller to become a No. 1 hit on Billboard's Adult Contemporary chart. Apparently, though, according to Wikipedia, "Never Gonna Let You Go" in the form I know wasn't the first rodeo for the romantic ballad. In 1982, Dionne Warwick and Stevie Woods recorded their own versions on their own albums, but the Pizzulo and Miller version was the one to take things to the top.

For all intents and purposes, that was the first time I had ever heard of Sergio Mendes...through his AOR phase in the 1980s. It wouldn't be until much later that I learned about his major contributions to bossa nova through Brasil '66, and of course, their classic "Mas que Nada".

"Never Gonna Let You Go" is a ballad that is so 1980s that it can make me want to put on a skinny tie and grow a mullet again. And in fact, when I got out to do the painting, that very song entered my head once more. But it wasn't just something that I heard out among the wooden fences. I also knew about how popular it was because of the late Casey Kasem's televised "America's Top 10" in which it got plenty of notice (although the program above doesn't have it in the Top 10 here).

Speaking of discovering someone anew, I had no idea that Kasem had been a veteran radio DJ and was surprised to find out that the voice actor behind Shaggy of "Scooby Doo" and team leader Mark on the imported and dubbed version of "Gatchaman" (aka "Battle of the Planets") had been spinning discs all this time. Now...back to the countdown.

So, what were the Top 3 singles on Oricon for April 1983?

1. Takashi Hosokawa -- Yagiri no Watashi (矢切の渡し)

2. Akina Nakamori -- Ni-bun no Ichi no Shinwa （1/2の神話）

3. Akio Kayama -- Hisame （氷雨）

September 27, 2022: Oh, by the way, I just came across this Rick Beato YouTube video proclaiming "Never Gonna Let You Go" as the most complex pop song of all time. 

Akio Kayama/Mika Hino/Teresa Teng -- Hisame （氷雨）

Probably one of the most recognized enka songs there is, "Hisame" (Icy Rain) is the song that most likely every enka singer and even beyond has tackled on stage or in front of the TV cameras. On YouTube, Mood Kayo veteran Kiyoshi Maekawa (前川清of The Cool Five) has given his rendition, but Akina Nakamori（中森明菜）also covered it some years ago, and even the late singer Minako Honda（本田美奈子） gave her tribute to it.

But I wanted to center this article on the renditions by the original singer, Akio Kayama（佳山明生）, the first female enka singer to give it a spin, Mika Hino（日野美歌）, and finally Teresa Teng（テレサテン）, who makes any enka song sound great. "Hisame" was written and composed by Ren Tomari（とまりれん）, and it follows the classic enka trope of "crying into your sake" as the lonely protagonist just hangs about in a bar feeling sorry for himself/herself since there is no one home to come to....at least, not anymore.

The very first version of "Hisame" came out in December 1977 as Hokkaido-born Akio Kayama's debut single. It seems to have been the enka song that would never die as it was released again in late 1981, and then a 3rd release was made in July 1982. Well, it was three times lucky for Kayama as this version torpedoed into sales of about 800,000 records into 1983. I'm not sure if the 1982 version had undergone major changes from the first two attempts, but the video above is for this take, and it is the one with that famous melancholy intro that has greeted professional enka singers, karaoke amateurs and audiences alike for years. It peaked at No. 2 on Oricon and eventually became the 5th-ranked song for 1983. And at the Japan Record Awards for 1983, it won the Grand Prize as well as the Long-Seller's Prize. I guess timing is everything, even for a song that at the time was already 6 years old.

In December 1982, Mika Hino covered "Hisame" as her 2nd single. The arrangement here is different but no less melancholy. Although the song can and has been covered by male and female singers alike, I've wondered if the song was truly made for a woman. Kayama's delivery seems, at least to me anyways, to take on a feminine quality, and Hino certainly makes her version her own. Her delivery has a bit more of a fuller body and more resonance when she sings it. And apparently, the lyrics for her version have also been slightly altered. As for her success with the song, it peaked at No. 5 and then became the 15th-ranked song for 1983. I can gather that it isn't everyday that the same song sung by two different singers can get into the Top 20 of Oricon in the same year.

Teresa Teng's cover of "Hisame" was never released as an official single, but I've always enjoyed her voice when she delivers those enka classics. The melody follows that for the Kayama original.

At this point in my life, I don't think I would ever be able to competently give my own version of the song in the karaoke box, but I'm more than content to listen to the professionals handling it.