Hey, go look up 'fun'

Is Eurobeat music's new Platonic ideal?

by Michael Freedberg

Thanks to a tidal wave of Eurodance hits, the personality of US pop music has changed completely this past year. What was once clunky, sour, and bristling now soars, sweetens, and glows -- quickly as it pumps and pumps the beat. In place of irony, dreaminess; instead of anger, joy. What the hell is going on?

The nation's music press are the last folks to put that question to. They bemoan the decline of alternative rock (which never was such a big deal anyway), waiting for that next big thing when it's already here. Led by the German duo La Bouche's million-seller Sweet Dreams (RCA; three pop single hits so far and more coming), "Eurobeat," "Eurodance," or "happy house" -- whatever you want to call it -- is a fast-moving, deliciously melodic, night-dream believer's sound that's suddenly commanding radio attention here in the US. And doing so in spite of its direct descent from -- horror of horrors! -- the fluffiest, most girlishly dizzy kind of classic 1970s disco. Every hour now, radio turns to these children of Lipps, Inc, Tantra, and Silver Convention to rescue the airwaves from flatness: Amber's "This Is the Night," Real McCoy's "Another Night," No Mercy's "Where Do You Go," Robert Miles's "Children" and "One to One," Corona's "Rhythm of the Night" and "I Don't Want To Be a Star," Ace of Base's "Beautiful Life," Fun Factory's "Close to You," La Bouche's "Be My Lover," "Tonight Is the Night," and "Falling in Love." They're topped by the biggest hit of them all (indeed, the biggest pop hit ever), Los Del Rio's flamenco-Eurohouse "Macarena," the story of a pretty little beach tease who flirts with all the boys and stays with none. You can't move these days without hearing little Miss Macarena pucker up and say a coolly electronic "hi!" into your ear.

What will the Smashing Munchkins do now? The Crapberries? Bummer Than Ezra? What can they do but go back to the college library and look up the word "fun"?

More than the sound has changed. Take the format. In place of single-artist CDs, for the most part, the happy high-Euro sound lives in compilations. Collections of singles emphasize the primacy of the Euro genre, its structure, its expression; and because the news of it is the sound itself, compilations are just about all a fan needs if he wants to breathe in his chosen ether. Not that this season's mountain of compilations feature only Eurobeat. House music -- especially "hard house," a painfully powerful sound -- injects its uniquely dark, gothic potion of midnight and horniness into some notable collections. The terrific Burn: The Best of Dance Baby Records Vol. 1 (Dance Baby), for example, broadcasts only on the house-music waveband. And why not, when the voice at the mike brings as much grit and glee into play as this label's special diva, Michelle Weeks? (Weeks also sings one song, "I Don't Know Why," on Ichiban Records' Instant Dance Party and just about trumps the lot.) Likewise, house in its Latin-beat, Spanish-language version (called "traxx" by fans) is the sole topic of La factoría del sabor (Popular/BMG), 15 songs (best: "Mujeres," by the Lou Boogie Experience) that zip and slash, double-talking the beat in a style typical of Junior Vasquez, clubland's most masterful DJ.

Most compilations, however, switch back and forth from house and freestyle to Euro and techno -- a strategy that highlights Eurodance's fast, flighty elegance all the more and allows the most elegant of its sky pilots to best the competition as they take you higher. Which means that you'll probably buy NMC Groove Vol. I (NMC) for the sake of Finland's Miisa glorifying "Get Ready" and "P.F.B." at a tempo that feels racy yet cool. And that you'll need Big Ones of Dance Volume 1 (Box Tunes/PolyGram) because it includes Ruffneck featuring Yavahn's "Everybody Be Somebody," a big hit in clubland, in which Yavahn's fast, raucous yell sculpts the beat in your face. DMA Dance Vol. 2: Eurodance (Interhit) also parades hits: La Bouche's "Be My Lover" and 2 Unlimited's most ephemeral song, "No One." But the climactic moments here belong to Outta Control's dewy-eyed version of Joan Osborne's "One of Us" and two fast, fast flights through air as sugar-flavored as a sticky bun, Cartouche's "Miracles" and Masterboy's "Anybody."

Interhit offers a second compilation, NRG Unlimited 1, in which the singsongy siren sound of classic fast disco gets a second listen, especially in Bianca's "Hypnotic Tango" and Lipstick's "Back for Good" -- mild melodies and whisper voices that flicker like billion-year-old light from faraway space. Eurodance's union of fantasy, distance, and girlishness reaches its epitome in Rambo Mix (Blanco y Negro, Spain), a two-CD set you'll have to go to Barcelona -- or your corner bodega -- to find, but worth the trip in order to own El Bosco's blissful "Nirvana," Leela's shy-eyed "Angel," Living Joy's outstretched diva song "Dreamer," and Princess Paragon's girl-to-girl version of Lenny Kravitz's "A Girl like You."

These CDs are definitely purist music. Pop hooks play almost no part. Instead, the melody and voices give up their shape in search of an almost imaginary dreaminess. And if this dreaminess is almost always tinged with a melancholy as light to the touch as a cloud -- the style's sopranos sound as anonymous as the messages of angels -- its avoidance of realism is exactly the point. Eurobeat is concept work. In it, the illogic of romance states its ideal again and again, like a truism, an act of proof by demonstration. There never has been pop music more logical and purely Platonic than Eurobeat. That an ideal love and an ideal happiness exists and can be striven for is the first premise underlying Eurobeat's genius. Which is why the almost identical-twin similarity of form (female diva, male rapper, pulsating electronic riffs) among La Bouche, Real McCoy, Snap, Corona, and Captain Hollywood intensifies the truth of the music rather than disperses it.

All manifestations of Eurobeat manifest this proof, even those that crutch themselves on dance-rock hooks and world beat. The 15 tracks of yet another compilation, Deconstruction Presents (BMG), may grind through hard techno's familiar surfaces (best: Monkey Mafia's "Work Mi' Body" and N-Joi's "Anthem"), but what matters is the blissful outcry of singer De'Lacy waving her wand in two Euro-diva tours-de-force, "That Look (Hani's Club Look II Radio Edit)" and "Hideaway (Deep Dish Remix)." Similarly, earthiness and magic-carpet rides -- Brazilian style -- play yin and yang from the first, Money Mark note of Red Hot + Rio (Antilles) to the bad-boy last words said by samba rebels Chico Science and Funk 'n' Lata. Everything But the Girl, in "Corcovado," and Crystal Waters, doing "The Boy from Ipanema," also appear, snoring the music like voices in heavily shaded sleepwalk.

Lastly, Eurobeat superstars Culture Beat and La Bouche present their own new CDs, Inside Out (Sony Germany) and All Mixed Up (EMI), in which the matter-of-factness of the first and the bright-lit glamor of the second -- and the super, super speediness of both -- reinforce each other like buttresses. Up into the ceiling they curve, Culture Beat in "Take Me Away," "Inside Out," and "Miracle," La Bouche's Melanie Thornton in two versions each of "Tonight Is the Night," "I Love To Love," and "Be My Lover," the beat pulsating without a lapse, as if the perfect love once attained could shine forever without ever having to stumble.

The pages of my copy of Plato's Republic need to be re-read.