Inner Circle

Contributed by James Phelan

As an older child, I watched The Hit List with Tarzan Dan most Saturday afternoons. Tarzan Dan was given a show on YTV when there was still real and sincere confusion about what sorts of TV personalities children should be encouraged -- or could, at least, be expected -- to identify with. He was an FM radio DJ in the grand old style: loud guy, loud clothes, lots of shtick. Everything in his manner showed overeagerness to please. He always sounded like he was giving away free t-shirts. His show was a Top 30 video countdown, and the chart had that diversity TV charts had in the early to mid- 90s, before the media used to promote popular music caught up with the fragmentation of the market for it. And though the chart clearly privileged kid acts like Joey Lawrence and TBTBT, there was (rightly, if incorrectly) no assumption that music with a mostly older audience wouldn't appeal to children.The videos were mostly terrible but the show was pretty great. My favorite Hit List hits were, in no special order: "I Would Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)" by Meat Loaf, "Great Big Love" by Bruce Cockburn, "Enid" by the Barenaked Ladies, and "Sweat (A La La La La Long)" by Inner Circle.

Greg has already written well about "I Would Do Anything for Love." "Great Big Love" is, on reconsideration, kind of a dud, though my memory of listening to it gives Cockburn's better records ("Tokyo," "The Trouble with Normal," "Lovers in a Dangerous Time," "Peggy's Kitchen Wall," "How I Spent My Fall Vacation," etc.) a nice nostalgic aura. "Enid" is probably the Barenaked Ladies' finest moment -- their best shot at credible-pop-band success before turning into Canadian joke rock Jimmy Buffett times five. (Even the video for the song shows that, alas, that's where they're headed.)

This is about Inner Circle -- about "Sweat."

Inner Circle is an institutional band, like The Drifters or Menudo. They have recorded some twenty-five albums since 1974, with four different front men and regularly changing personnel, in a variety of reggae genres. Their biggest international hit to date has been "Bad Boys," the theme song to the official organ of bad PR for the American poor, COPS. "Sweat," like "Bad Boys," was recorded by the line-up fronted by Calton Coffie, which turned the band away from radical rasta politics and a hard-edged sound, towards pop universalism.

Calton Coffie is a big fat goofball who wants the world to be happy. I can tell this from the video for "Sweat." The video's promise of happiness is extravagant -- it's all joyous bad dancing and people about to get laid in paradise -- and the song lives up to it, by being perfect. The song is perfect in that every part of it is irresistible. I just listened to it trying to count the number of hooks, and I couldn't do it. The song never lags, never abates in being excellent in the way it's excellent (which, I'll grant, isn't for everyone). By that last qualification, I don't mean that it's a specialist taste. It so easily overcomes the inherent cornballism of its genre, pop party reggae, and the ambient cornballism of its moment, the early 90s, that it's not really worth talking about. Calton Coffie knows how good a song it is, though he doesn't want to make a big deal about it. He's just going to sing it and dance, fatly, goofily, making the best of his moment of grace on earth by sharing it.

This is fitting, as it's a song about generosity, the song of a generous lover. Pop songwriting is, as much as it's anything else, the art of writing about sexual love in a way that can be sung wholeheartedly and sound true and still get played on the radio. In commercial genres, coded language is the norm, and pop literacy means knowing how to decode lyrics. But machoness and misogyny are mainstays of Caribbean music, so a casual listener can be excused for thinking all the business about making you sweat till you can't sweat no more, and going on making you sweat even after you cry out, is a wolfishly aggressive come-on, or worse. It's not. Clearly, clearly it's a song about wanting to make someone come as much as is physically possible. Proof: he tells her he wants to make her sweat "till she can't sweat no more." If he literally did that -- if he exhausted her body's store of water, leaving it incapable of regulating its temperature -- she would die in dry agony. Serge Gainsbourg might, at his very grimmest, have written an upbeat reggae number about sex-murder by dehydration. I'm quite sure Calton Coffie did not. But substitute "come" for "sweat" and the line not only makes sense, it's idiomatic.

Speaking of Serge Gainsbourg, an indie rock band of a certain type looking for a surefire hit could do worse than to cover "Sweat" in the style of "Je Suis Venu Te Dire Que Je M'en Vais." (When you thank me in the liner notes, remember it's P-h-e-l-a-n: e before a and no F.)

More proof the song is about wanting to give its addressee orgasms: the second time the line comes around -- I only just noticed this -- Coffie changes the phrasing of "My tongue gets tied" so that it sounds like "My tongue gets tired." Of course, there shouldn't be any need to offer that sort of evidence to anyone who enjoys the song. With rare exceptions, the correct interpretation of a beautiful song's meaning is whichever one does it the most credit. To insist on a less generous one, without having a very good reason for favoring it, is to want to diminish the world in a small but definite way. It's barbaric.

That being said, to appreciate the record's greatness, it isn't necessary to think the song is about generosity in bed, or even to know what that might mean. I loved "Sweat" before I knew what sex was and have listened to it with undiminished pleasure ever since. (Though I have, regrettably, gone through long periods of forgetting it or figuring it's not the sort of thing I'd like anymore.) While writing the above I played it at least a dozen times. I have never tired of hearing it.