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seedarklyxeroWelcome to SeeDarkly Sunday DisCOVERies:
a weekly exploration of goth, industrial, & dark alternative cover songs!
First time here? Click here for details from first entry.
Traveling back in time for our monthly Third Sunday Throwback to the 20th century, this week I learned that this song has nothing to do with 18th century witch hunts. I don't know why I've always thought that. It may have even been inspiration for a short story I once wrote ABOUT a witch who danced. Mandela effect perhaps? In any case this one hit wonder from the eighties got a highly crunchy nod from a lesser known industrial project near the turn of the century!:
Pain Station - Safety Dance (Men Without Hats)
Canadian newwave/synth-poppers Men Without Hats first released Safety Dance on their debut album Rhythm of Youth in April 1982. They made the track their second single and it was a global sensation, charting in multiple countries, but only achieving #1 ranking in South Africa and on the US Billboard dance charts.
Frontman and songwriter Ivan Doroschuk said, "the song was really written about me after I got kicked out of a bar in Ottawa. I got kicked out for pogoing to The B-52s, I think, Rock Lobster. It was the dying days of disco. I got kicked out of the bar and went home and wrote this. I think it's a message that kids still want to hear today: yeah, it is safe to dance."
Pogo dancing, the early ancestor of mosh dancing, was basically bouncing wildly about while keeping extremities and torso stiff. As a fad, it was mostly popular in the punk scene, and Doroschuk felt that his band was punk for being highly anti authoritarian. The video for the track was set in ye olde England, where the band traverses a village leading them in a type of English folk dance called a Morris dance.
While I may have been confused about the song's meaning being about witch hunts, many others over the years have confused it with ideas about masturbation, safe sex, and nuclear war, all of which Doroschuk has denied.
There have been over three dozen covers of the song, and strangely most are by obscure artists of which few or none have heard. Some of those include Trans-X, Dead Flower Children, The Echoing Green, Luxt, Fear Cult, and Elisium.
The one you're getting here comes from yet another of the various artists cover compilations put out by Cargo Music's defunct industrial label, Re-constriction Records, Nod's Tacklebox O' Fun, release in 1999. Nod was a cat-like cartoon character created by artist Jay Stephens for an underground comic book series The Land of Nod published around the time. Someone at the label must have liked the comic because they commissioned Stephens for original art of the character to appear on the album cover.
The collection boasts seventeen also obscure artists paying tribute to a wild variety of pop music mostly for the eighties and nineties (though there is a cover of Ministry's decidedly not pop, Revenge.)
Pain Station, is a side project of Scott Sturgis, who is currently focused on his other long running noise-industrial effort, Converter. His version of Safety Dance is laced with deeper and crunchier beats. It has an electronic groove with a little less bounce and his vocals are much harsher, even angrier, than the original. You might not choose to pogo to it, but you could do more than nod.:
The Cover:
The Original:
Next week:
Yeah, I haven't gotten gothy in a while.
Yeah, I ought to do something about that.
Yeah, I'll purge that need with a recent goth cover you won't need an atlas to find. ◔ヮ◔
So as of this posting during Martin Luther King Jr weekend, I am currently at the Arisia sci-fi/fantasy convention in Boston. Last night I DJ'ed one of two gigs for the event. All that's left is a time travel party featuring music from the last half century... all pretty broad-range so it's not for the goth/industrial "purists"... but I WILL be blending in a lot of cross-format goodies and other surprises. The dance ALSO serves as a fundraiser to benefit the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center. So if you like geeky things, plan to be in the area, and want to check us out, or if you just want to be generous and make a donation to the fundraiser, CLICK HERE for DETAILS!
Feel free to leave a comment about that or tell me what you think about today's cover!
(You do NOT need a Dreamwidth account to comment, but all comments are screened for spam prevention.)
Explore the darkness,
-Xero
Previous DisCOVERies
Jan 13 - Clayfeet - Creep (Radiohead)
Jan 06 - Manufactura - Sex, Money, Freaks (Cabaret Voltaire)
Dec 30 - Fictional - Happiest Girl (Depeche Mode)
Dec 23 - Unheilig - Kling Glöckchen Klingelingeling (Traditional)
Dec 16 - Rasputina - Why Don't You Do Right? (Lil Green)
. Directory of All Previous DisCOVERies .
a weekly exploration of goth, industrial, & dark alternative cover songs!
First time here? Click here for details from first entry.
Traveling back in time for our monthly Third Sunday Throwback to the 20th century, this week I learned that this song has nothing to do with 18th century witch hunts. I don't know why I've always thought that. It may have even been inspiration for a short story I once wrote ABOUT a witch who danced. Mandela effect perhaps? In any case this one hit wonder from the eighties got a highly crunchy nod from a lesser known industrial project near the turn of the century!:
Pain Station - Safety Dance (Men Without Hats)
Canadian newwave/synth-poppers Men Without Hats first released Safety Dance on their debut album Rhythm of Youth in April 1982. They made the track their second single and it was a global sensation, charting in multiple countries, but only achieving #1 ranking in South Africa and on the US Billboard dance charts.
Frontman and songwriter Ivan Doroschuk said, "the song was really written about me after I got kicked out of a bar in Ottawa. I got kicked out for pogoing to The B-52s, I think, Rock Lobster. It was the dying days of disco. I got kicked out of the bar and went home and wrote this. I think it's a message that kids still want to hear today: yeah, it is safe to dance."
Pogo dancing, the early ancestor of mosh dancing, was basically bouncing wildly about while keeping extremities and torso stiff. As a fad, it was mostly popular in the punk scene, and Doroschuk felt that his band was punk for being highly anti authoritarian. The video for the track was set in ye olde England, where the band traverses a village leading them in a type of English folk dance called a Morris dance.
While I may have been confused about the song's meaning being about witch hunts, many others over the years have confused it with ideas about masturbation, safe sex, and nuclear war, all of which Doroschuk has denied.
There have been over three dozen covers of the song, and strangely most are by obscure artists of which few or none have heard. Some of those include Trans-X, Dead Flower Children, The Echoing Green, Luxt, Fear Cult, and Elisium.
The one you're getting here comes from yet another of the various artists cover compilations put out by Cargo Music's defunct industrial label, Re-constriction Records, Nod's Tacklebox O' Fun, release in 1999. Nod was a cat-like cartoon character created by artist Jay Stephens for an underground comic book series The Land of Nod published around the time. Someone at the label must have liked the comic because they commissioned Stephens for original art of the character to appear on the album cover.
The collection boasts seventeen also obscure artists paying tribute to a wild variety of pop music mostly for the eighties and nineties (though there is a cover of Ministry's decidedly not pop, Revenge.)
Pain Station, is a side project of Scott Sturgis, who is currently focused on his other long running noise-industrial effort, Converter. His version of Safety Dance is laced with deeper and crunchier beats. It has an electronic groove with a little less bounce and his vocals are much harsher, even angrier, than the original. You might not choose to pogo to it, but you could do more than nod.:
The Cover:
The Original:
Next week:
Yeah, I haven't gotten gothy in a while.
Yeah, I ought to do something about that.
Yeah, I'll purge that need with a recent goth cover you won't need an atlas to find. ◔ヮ◔
So as of this posting during Martin Luther King Jr weekend, I am currently at the Arisia sci-fi/fantasy convention in Boston. Last night I DJ'ed one of two gigs for the event. All that's left is a time travel party featuring music from the last half century... all pretty broad-range so it's not for the goth/industrial "purists"... but I WILL be blending in a lot of cross-format goodies and other surprises. The dance ALSO serves as a fundraiser to benefit the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center. So if you like geeky things, plan to be in the area, and want to check us out, or if you just want to be generous and make a donation to the fundraiser, CLICK HERE for DETAILS!
Feel free to leave a comment about that or tell me what you think about today's cover!
(You do NOT need a Dreamwidth account to comment, but all comments are screened for spam prevention.)
Explore the darkness,
-Xero
Previous DisCOVERies
Jan 13 - Clayfeet - Creep (Radiohead)
Jan 06 - Manufactura - Sex, Money, Freaks (Cabaret Voltaire)
Dec 30 - Fictional - Happiest Girl (Depeche Mode)
Dec 23 - Unheilig - Kling Glöckchen Klingelingeling (Traditional)
Dec 16 - Rasputina - Why Don't You Do Right? (Lil Green)
. Directory of All Previous DisCOVERies .