Huey Lewis & The News

It makes sense that Huey Lewis & The News were one of the most popular bands of the 80s. Huey was good looking in a dumb guy-next-door way, a rock & roll Dobie Gillis, and his band could appear to play hard even if they neglected to generate any intensity,

This San Francisco sextet was responsible for several empty-headed Top 10 hits - among them I Want A  New Drug, The Heart Of Rock & Roll and Stuck With You - but those annoyances were merely bland compared to Hip To Be Square, which was genuinely malevolent, popping up everywhere from college marching band halftime shows to Las Vegas showrooms. It was also big at weddings.

Musically, Hip To Be Square was marginally more interesting than what Lewis and company usually conjured up: the fast beat was agreeable enough  and the band sounded less reined-in than usual by the group's inevitable drum-machine taskmaster. Lyrically, however, this was a perfect anthem of rationalization for uneasy sell-outs.  

The narrator of the song has cut his hair, scored a "good" job, and realized that, yes, its hip to be square, because in this context "square" means financially successful.

We'll leave you by saying that  Hip To Be Square was a pox on rock & roll in the late 80s, and to draw your own conclusions about the fact that Huey Lewis and The News were eulogized by psycho-killer Patrick Bateman in the book American Psycho.