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.
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