OH MY GOD IT’S SO EXCITING: The Second-hottest Hit of the 90s

At number two, a heterosexual rejection letter, which doubles as an introduction to queer studies.

2. White Town, Your Woman (1997, #7)

The story of Your Woman, White Town’s 1997 hit single, might start with Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective. The TV series, which originally aired in the UK in 1986, features a writer of detective novels with a dreadful skin disease who keeps flashing back and forth between one of his novels and his own childhood. Watching it is akin to being under ether, because you’re constantly trying to figure out what’s happening, and when, and why. Making things more complicated is the fact that all the characters keep breaking out into musical numbers, lip syncing big band numbers from the thirties even when it seems like they don’t want to.

In the mid-eighties, when the show first aired, Hollywood wasn’t really into musicals, and definitely not old-timey song-and-dance ones. But in the mid-nineties, it seemed like people were ready for the return of the old-fashioned musical, and Woody Allen of all people was one of the first to try it. His star-studded Everyone Says I Love You uses songs from the big band era to tell a really happy story of a huge family who go to Paris and all fall in love. Goldie Hawn and Julia Roberts and Natasha McElhone traipsed around the city of light singing hits of the big band era.

And less than a month after Everyone Says I Love You was released, the interwar era returned yet again, this time on modern rock radio. A few months ahead of the Squirrel Nut Zippers’ Hell and dreaded swing revival of 1998, White Town’s Your Woman kicked off with a reedy Al Woolly sample. With vocals processed to sound like a voice from the distant past, one-man band Jyoti Mishra read a letter of apology to an enamored suitor, a kiss-off that was a little bit angry, a little bit sad, and a little bit ambiguous.

The song is told from the point of view of a woman, speaking to a man she’s breaking up with. Until my friends convinced me otherwise, I spent the first fifty or so listens of this song convinced that it was actually sung by a woman. One with a deep voice, like Alison Moyet, maybe, who I feel like was probably a big influence on White Town. In fact, despite about fifteen years’ difference, Your Woman sounds like it could have come out around the same time as songs like Depeche Mode’s Just Can’t Get Enough or Situation, a big hit for Moyet’s band Yaz.
Of course, both of those groups are very popular with the gays, and so was this song, despite the fact that Mishra (and both of the characters in the song) are most likely straight. It’s a man singing from the point of view of a woman, that’s all, a rare but not unheard of occurrence that happens every once in awhile in pop songs–think of Jay and the Americans’ Come A Little Bit Closer. But one of the great things about Your Woman is its ability to take on multiple meanings—listen to the song again and Mishra could just as easily be a man saying that he could never be a woman.
With a poppy piano line that dandies and soccer moms alike could appreciate, the song was all over the place in early 1997, but Mishra really wasn’t. Barely appearing in the song’s video, he never seemed to be interviewed in magazines and I still don’t really know what he looks like.* He parted ways unhappily with his label shortly after the single became a hit and eventually decamped to Parasol before starting his own label a few years ago. He stills makes songs, good ones at that, and tries to keep things lively in his hometown of Essex.

(*Okay, now I know, sort of. Thanks, Google image search!)

Further listening:

Al Bowlly, My Woman
The sample that started it all.

Yaz, Situation
The gay diva.

Soul Coughing, Down To This
Another, very different, use of an old-timey song in the mid-90’s.

White Town, Death In Kettering (link)
His new stuff, you should check it out. You can listen to his whole new album at CDBaby.

Revolution 9, Throughout The World
Sounds a lot like his new stuff. Guys in LA that do fake British accents and try to be Depeche Mode. They’re pretty good, if you’re into that sort of thing.

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