OH MY GOD ANOTHER LIST: The Fifth-Hottest Hit of the Nineties

At number 5 on my countdown of the 101 Greatest Pop Hits of the Nineties, the first single off the highest-selling debut album in history.

5. Ace of Base, All That She Wants (1993, #2)

My first CD was Amy Grant’s Heart In Motion, which featured hit singles Baby Baby, Every Heartbeat, and I Will Remember You. I didn’t have a CD player to play it on and my parents didn’t really want me touching theirs, but my grandmother got it for me because she didn’t know the difference between a CD and a tape. She’d do it again the next year, which is how the soundtrack to Wayans Brothers comedy Mo’ Money became my second CD.

But my third CD, Ace of Base’s The Sign, was the first one I went to the Circuit City and picked out myself. I had just gotten my first stereo, and would spend the next five months playing that one album virtually nonstop (until I bought Everybody Else Is Doing It So Why Can’t We?) Some songs, like Happy Nation and Wheel of Fortune, would get played a dozen times a day, usually in a row, because my stereo had a repeat button and I liked pushing buttons.

All That She Wants and The Sign (as well as later singles Don’t Turn Around and Living In Danger) made me very, very happy because they were mine and I could play them myself, whenever I wanted. But personal reasons aside, the Swedish quartet (three siblings and an ex-neo-Nazi) put out some great Europop singles.

Already a big hit in Europe, the Happy Nation album was repackaged for American audiences with a new song and a new title, The Sign. Darker sounding songs like Fashion Party and the hilariously somber Boney M homage Munchhausen (Just Chaos) were eliminated. Put out in America around the same time as dance-oriented singles like Haddaway’s What Is Love and Culture Beat’s Mr Vain, All That She Wants had a catchier beat, more memorable lyrics, and a wonderfully farty fake saxophone.

Unlike other dance acts of the time, who filled up their videos with dancing and models, Ace of Base had a different presentation. The video for All That She Wants is sepia-toned and slow-moving.* Singer Linn Berggren is pretty and blonde, but she’s dressed like an art historian and unhappily lip-syncs at the camera without much emotion. There’s no dancing, no color, and no joy.

Reggae, even of the white European variety, previously had a minimal impact on American charts. Snow’s Informer had been a big hit, but that was a fluke; Shaggy, an honest-to-goodness Jamaican whose cover of the Folkes Brothers’ Oh Carolina was a huge hit in Europe, could only reach #59 on the Hot 100. But All That She Wants would go on to become the highest-selling #2 single in US history, and it paved the way for more reggae-influenced pop. Shortly after All That She Wants, songs like Inner Circle’s trashy reality-show theme song Bad Boys and Big Mountain’s cheesy cover of Baby I Love Your Way would become hits, not to mention Jimmy Cliff’s I Can See Clearly Now, which hit the top 40 in 1994 thanks to Disney’s Cool Runnings. Soon Diana King, Ini Kamoze, and later Shaggy singles would be tearing up the countdowns.

Further Listening:

Ace of Base, Munchhausen (Just Chaos)
He was a son of a gun!

Iain Morland - All That She Wants
This was posted on a Cakewalk message board, but this (demo?) version is miles better than the terrible covers by The Kooks or Wizo.

Errol Dunkley, OK Fred
Old school reggae pop.

Inner Circle, Sweat (A La La La Long)
The band’s second top 40 hit. A lot better than Bad Boys.

Haddaway, What Is Love?
Not so good, all these years later.

Culture Beat, Mr Vain
Not so bad, all these years later.

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