The government says you must listen to Billy Ray Cyrus [August 23, 1992]
Plus: Annie Lennox, Take That, Bananrama, and The Lemonheads
Greetings, Time Travellers! đ Welcome back to the week of August 23, 1992.
đ° In the news this week Hurricane Andrew smashes into the Bahamas before causing record-breaking structural damage in Florida.
đœïžNew films in the cinema include Juice, starring a (mostly) unknown young actor called Tupac Shakur.
đșOn TV, BBC broadcasts the final episode of their six-part adaption of Five Children and It.
đ¶ Number One song in the UK Top 40 is still âRhythm Is A Dancerâ, but snapping at itâs heels isâŠ
This weekâs Number 3: âAchy Breaky Heartâ â Billy Ray Cyrus
Teenagers in Ireland get to enjoy some of the longest school holidays in the world. Three glorious months of intermittent sunshine and no homeworkâit is bliss.
Of course, the longer youâre away, the harder it is to go back. Nothing is as soul-deadening as those final days of August, when the autumnal drizzle starts to settle in, when youâre trying on your scratchy school uniform (itâs too big, but youâll grow into it), when your parents are covering your schoolbooks in leftover wallpaper, when itâs dark at dinnertime each evening, and it finally dawns on you that it is time to return to that awful place.
Going back after the summer of 1992 was especially hard for me because it meant Third Year, and Third Year in Ireland is a year of hellish exams. Nine months of pain, they told us at the end of Second Year. Worse than having a baby.
On the first day back at school, I discovered that everyone in my class had a growth spurtâexcept me. I was half a foot below everyoneâs eyeline, feeling even more invisible than I had the previous year.
Can things possibly get any worse?
Of course they would, and of course it would somehow involve my PE teacher.
My PE teacher was a woman roughly my height (which, at that point, was quite small), with the coiled, compressed strength of a featherweight boxer. Usually, she spent these classes barking at us to run faster while barely managing to disguise the loathing she felt at our being such a disappointing bunch of physical mediocrities.
But this week was different. For starters, she was smiling.
This smileâa previously unobserved phenomenonâwas so distracting that it took me a second to clock the fact that she wasnât in a tracksuit. Instead, she was wearing jeans and a tucked-in plaid shirt.
I got that ice-cold creeping up my spine, like a character in a horror movie who realises that thereâs somebody in the house.
She may have said âhowdy yâallâ One-by-one, everyone in my class started to realise what was about to happen.
We had heard about it in the news. We had seen it on TV. Perhaps some of our parents had tried it, and then enthusiastically encouraged us to try it, and we had all refused it because we were a hardcore grunge school (with a small subculture of ravers.)
And, of course, we knew that song. Everyone knew that song. You couldnât leave your house without hearing that song. If it wasnât on the radio (it was always on the radio) you would hear people whistling it.
We had tried to escape. We thought we were immune. But now we were trapped.
We had to do line dancing.
The 90s had plenty of novelty dance crazes: Voguing, the Macarena, the Saturday Night, the Running Man.
But âAchy Breaky Heartâ was more than just a dance. It was a whole style of dancing, a style of music, and a cultural aesthetic that suddenly became part of the mainstream.
From Alberta to Auckland, from Carlow to Cape Town, wherever white people congregated in 1992, you would hear the sound of boots being scooted. People wore plaid shirts tucked into blue jeans. People wore stetsons.
In a previous newsletter, we talked about how âSmells Like Teen Spiritâ seemed to launch an overnight cultural transformation. âAchy Breaky Heartâ did something similar, especially in Ireland which already had quite a high tolerance for country music.
But there was one crucial difference. My PE teacher never put on Nevermind and taught us how to mosh. And yet somehow, in the Autumn of 1992, I found myself in PE class, being forced to learn how to grapevine.
Remember, this was a state-mandated PE class. My teacher was a civil servant. In effect, the government were forcing me to dance to Billy Ray Cyrus.

It was weird for me, and it was also a weird time for Billy Ray Cyrus. âAchy Breaky Heartâ made him an international superstar but it also left him strangely isolated.
Country music in general often struggles for any kind of mainstream acceptance (Iâve lost count of the people Iâve heard say, âI listen to a bit of everythingâŠexcept country.â) Country artists are usually treated as outsiders until they pivot to pop and distance themselves from their CMT roots, like Shania Twain and Taylor Swift.
Billy Ray Cyrus has always stayed true to country, but country was a little embarrassed by him. Which was predictable in a way: this is a genre that fetishises rustic authenticity, so there was bound to be some pushback against an ex-stripper whoâs big in the pop charts.
Country diehards hated âAchy Breaky Heartâ almost as much as I did in 1992, with Travis Tritt saying that Cyrus had reduced the genre to an âass-wiggling contestâ. When âAchy Breaky Heartâ won a fan-voted CMA in 1993, a visibly upset Cyrus slammed his hand on the podium and yelled, âhereâs a quarter, call someone who cares!â
(Thatâs the name of a Travis Tritt song, btw.)
Looking back now, I can admit that âAchy Breaky Heartâ wasnât terrible. Iâll go further and say⊠itâs actually a good song. Itâs funny and catchy, and Cyrus is hella charm. The man can pull off a mullet, you have to respect him.
The problem was, I think, is that everyone was so overwhelmed by the song at the time. Existing country music fans had to deal with millions of casuals showing up at their clubs. Non-country fans had to deal with country music existing. Billy Ray Cyrus found his life reduced to a constant debate about this harmless, throwaway pop song (which he didnât even write.)
In the years since, Iâve met plenty of people who genuinely love line dancing, and good luck to them. Itâs not for me, but Iâm sure that with a few beers and some good friends, itâs terrific fun.
Itâs just not fun when itâs forced on you. It is now fun when youâre being urged to do it by a PE teacher who is growing increasingly manic as she realises that something she enjoyed on a Saturday night is much less fun on a Tuesday morning. I think she had a vision of us getting into the groove, having a good time, maybe even throwing out an enthusiastic âyee haw!â
Instead, we shambled this forced jollity, like a bunch of accountants at a corporate retreat. We were terrible when we started. After an hour of instruction, we were somehow worse.
The following week, our PE teacher was back in her tracksuit, blowing her whistle and yelling at us all for being slow and clumsy. It was nice to have everything back to normal. Although, for years after, I would shudder whenever I heard that song.
Elsewhere in the charts
Number 9 (â from 23): âWalking On Broken Glassâ â Annie Lennox
Incredibly fun and very lavish video on this one. Hugh Laurie reprises his Blackadder character, John Malkovich is in Dangerous Liaisons mode, and Annie Lennox looks smashing in a red turban.
Number 15 (â from 17): âI Found Heavenâ â Take That
âI Found Heavenâ is the only Take That single that wasnât written by Gary Barlow (apart from their cover versions). And you can tellââI Found Heavenâ is pleasant enough, but it pales in comparison to the rest of Take That and Party!
Barlow gets a lot of stick these days for his intense Boring Uncle energy, but itâs actually quite remarkable that a young songwriter had such a successful pop career.
Number 24 (New Entry): âBulletproof!â â Pop Will Eat Itself
PWEI sometimes got dismissed as Just Another Baggy Band, which is wrong on multiple levels, starting with the fact that they were immensely competent musicians.
Thatâs obvious these days, now that Clint Mansell is a revered composer, but The Look Or The Lifestyle? was kind of dismissed by critics at the time. If you really give âBulletproof!â a chance though, you hear that itâs a remarkably clever and well-constructed psychedelic groove thatâs much tighter than other bands who were attempting the same thing.
Number 34 (New Entry): âMovin Onâ â Bananarama
The 1980s pop charts were dominated by two remarkable trios: the three women of Bananarama, and the omnipresent Stock, Aitken and Waterman.
Both trios became duos in 1991, following the departures of Jacquie OâSullivan and Matt Aitken. âMovin Onâ sees them join forces, and⊠yeah, they both sound a little diminished. Sara and Keren can still bring it vocally, as they always do, but the track itself sounds like Pete Waterman is sketching out a first draft of Steps. I donât want to compare it to Shakespears Sister, but there was no danger of this being Number One for eight weeks.
A perfectly serviceable pop song then, but everyone involved has done much better work.
Number 38 (New Entry): âItâs Probably Meâ â Sting feat. Eric Clapton
The dad rock that our dads used to listen to. Grandad rock? Anyway, I find this quite pleasant so I guess Iâm getting old.
Album of the Week
Itâs A Shame About Ray â The Lemonheads
If you werenât a plugged-in hipster in the early 90s, chances are that you discovered The Lemonheads the same way as most people: through their rock cover of Simon & Garfunkelâs âMrs Robinsonâ.
Evan Dando always hated that people discovered his music through this song (Paul Simon, apparently, wasnât thrilled with it either.) It didnât help that the closest they closest they had come to a hit before âMrs Robinsonâ was with a version of Suzanne Vegaâs âLukaâ.
âMrs Robinsonâ wasnât originally on Itâs A Shame About Ray, but the label quickly issued an expanded version of the album once there was some whiff of chart success.
Thatâs probably how most people came to own a copy of Itâs A Shame About Ray. You wonder what those people made of the record when they listened to the opening number, which a jaunty tune told from the point of view of a toddler in a stroller?
Probably not that put off, to be honest. A lot of people would have realised that they were in the presence of a great American pop great classicists who was doing something new while also harking back to a rich past.
Itâs a Shame About Ray proudly wears its influences on their sleeve, especially the nods to Big Star. Songs like âConfettiâ could sit easily on an album like #1 RecordâŠ
âŠwhile âAlisonâs Starting To Happenâ sounds like the Platonic ideal of that first song that every garage band writes. Thousands of bands have recorded a song like âAlisonâs Starting To Happenâ but few have ever nailed it like this:
The Lemonheads at this point in time include Juliana Hatfield (who had already released her solo debut) and David Ryan (who would drum for the band until 1995). But, ultimately, this is an Evan Dando record, dominated by his rich lyrics and melancholy voice.
There should be a word in German for the feeling you get when youâre listening to Dando sing. The kind of nostalgia thatâs glowing warm at first but you know itâs going to hurt later. Itâs looking an old photo of an ex; itâs driving past your childhood home and seeing that another family lives there. Whatever the word is for that feeling, thatâs the word for Evan Dando. It hits really hard on a sad song like âMy Drug Buddyâ:
The original tracklist of Itâs A Shame About Ray concludes with another cover version: âFrank Millsâ from the musical Hair. It might seem like a strange choice, except maybe itâs the clue to understanding how Dandoâs mind works.
He understands all music as one big story, and he wants to make something thatâs part of that story. Thatâs a noblest aspirations for any artist. And Itâs A Shame About Ray succeeds at doing that, with or without âMrs Robinsonâ. A classic, in every sense of the word.
Next Week
We were scheduled to look at The Shamenâs âEbeneezer Goodeâ anyway, so we might as well talk about Jerry Sadowitz.
One of the things I love about this newsletter is discovering new things about stuff I remember/was there for. It is only today that I am finding out that Hugh Laurie & John Malkovich were in the video for Breaking Glass! đźđ
Thinking about this, & recent posts on Geneis and even Shakespear's Sister - God record companies really spent big on videos back then. (They could still do... I'm an oldie that's out of the loop!)
The less said about line dancing and this country's over-acceptance of country the better! đ€Ł
I was in a youth club as a teenager and witnessed the line dancing craze. I didn't get roped in. But... someone we both know did. He (along with others) performed a line dancing set to 'Cotton-Eyed Joe'. I think he thought it would make him popular with the girls. It did, but not in the Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing kind of way. While this tune was released far in the future from your current blog posts (94 apparently), I thought it worth mentioning here. I will only reveal who it was two years from now. Hint: He married your cousin.
Oh and he performed it in fronts of lots of people. On a stage and everything.