The planet’s a mess, the US of A is going down the shitter, and everybody seems to hate everybody else, but it wasn’t always this way. There was a time, 1986 and early 1987 to be exact, when peace, love, and understanding reigned supreme.
And there was a simple reason for this—we were all Wang Chunging.
We were Wang Chunging in Detroit, Wang Chunging in Berlin, Bangkok, Bora Bora, and Bangor, Maine, Wang Chunging in clubs and cars and bars and retirement homes and passenger jets soaring high above the flyover states, where every single person in every single one of those flyover states was Wang Chunging until their eyes rolled up in the backs of their heads. None of us really knew what we were Wang Chunging about, or even what Wang Chunging entailed, but we were Wang Chunging anyway, and we were all deliriously happy.
And for that, we have the English New Wave duo Wang Chung to thank. I don’t know how they failed to win a Nobel Peace Prize.
The sad truth is Wang Chung never won a single prize period, and to add insult to injury the video for the song that had us all Wang Chunging to begin with, “Everybody Have Fun Tonight,” was banned by the BBC after a medical expert determined that its machine-gun editing (some shots approach up to 1/25th of a second between edits) could cause epileptic fits. It would have been one thing if it had been banned because it revealed Wang Chunging to be an interspecies sex act. But the video tells us nothing. You can watch it and Wang Chung to it, hell, you can even have an epileptic fit to it, but you still won’t know what Wang Chunging is.
No, we are and will always remain in the dark, but what I am prepared to say is that “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” is an excellent pop song and eminently Wang Chungable. I Wang Chung to it all the time. Most of my friends won’t admit to liking “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” and many tell me they hate it, but they’re lying. The anti-Wangers Wang Chung to “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” just like everybody else, only not in public. They double-lock the front and back doors, pull down the curtains and Wang Chung like their dick’s on fire.
And what’s not to like? The chorus may well be the best chorus to include a brand new verb, ever! I’m Wang Chunged every time I hear it! And catchy doesn’t even begin to describe it. The song’s melody is unimpeachable; Jack Hues sounds like an English David Byrne with the stick removed from his butt, and come to think of it, the whole song has a Talking Heads feel, particularly the bridge. And the lyrics! They’re positively global: “Across the nation/Around the world/Everybody have fun tonight/A celebration so spread the word.”
And to think the song was co-written by an actual AUSTRIAN, Peter Wolf by name, who was awarded the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art (the Österreichische Ehrenkreuz für Wissenschaft und Kunst) FIRST CLASS in 2002, no doubt for his part in writing “Everybody Have Fun Tonight.” It certainly wasn’t for playing with Frank Zappa in the late Seventies. The Austrians take away awards for things like that, and the Austrians are right.
The lyrics could lead you to think the “Wang Chung” is a dance craze, but Wang Chung scholars dispute this, saying that if the Wang Chung IS a dance, Wang Chung offers you no directions on how to do it. No, they call the following lines “mere boilerplate”:
“Rip it up, move down
Rip it up, move it down to the ground
Rip it up, cool down
Rip it up, get out what’s inside of you.”
Those aren’t dance instructions. They tell you nothing about what to do with your arms or your legs or your feet or your hips. If you want dance instructions, I direct you to “The Hokey-Pokey.”
In fact, Wang Chung experts concede they have very little idea of what’s going on in “Everybody Have Fun Tonight.” They admit to being flummoxed by lyrics like the following:
“On the edge of oblivion
And all the world is Babylon
And all the love and everyone
A ship of fools sailing on.”
But forget the lyrics, although I can’t help but admire the line “I’d drive a million miles to be with you tonight” because I can only think he’s taking back roads and getting lost a lot. Or he owns one of those boat-cars, and a very fast one at that. The bottom line is that “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” is fun, right down to its battery of horns, small army of backing vocalists, and irresistible dance pop rhythm. The song has swagger. It makes you move your hips, and when Hues hits those high notes in the lines cited just above you can’t help but say to yourself, “The guy just threw me down on the sofa and Wang Chunged me good and hard.”
Wang Chung’s only other undisputedly great song is “Dance Hall Days,” with its heavenly synth-line, chugging rhythm, lovely melody, and the inexplicable lines, “We were so in phase/In our dance hall days/We were cool on craze.” And at one point, Hues encourages you to grab your lover by the hair. And at another, by the ears! There are those who will tell you “Let’s Go” is great, but take away the big chorus, and what you have is a bore. And the lyrics are dumb in all the wrong ways. The minute someone starts talking about the “language of love,” my ears close up shop and take the rest of the week off.
Wang Chung’s original name was Huang Chung. They went by it for several years until David Geffen told them to change it or die. Huang Chung means yellow bell in Chinese. This helps us not a whit when it comes to understanding what it means to Wang Chung tonight, or any other night for that matter. Are we supposed to ring like little yellow bells? I don’t think so.
What else can I say? Other than I came, I got Wang Chunged, and I enjoyed it? Way back in 1986, when Frankie Goes to Hollywood were on their way down, the Talking Heads had shot their wad, and the Chernobyl and Challenger disasters were proving that both progress and technology sucked, many of us despaired. Then along came Wang Chung to Wang Chung us back to happiness with “Everybody Have Fun Tonight.”
I’ll Wang Chung you if you’ll Wang Chung me. I taught my dog how to Wang Chung, and he immediately became the most popular dog in the neighborhood. Wang Chunging is illegal in certain counties of Alabama. An anti-Wanger once had the audacity to tell me that “Everybody Wang Chung tonight” was meaningless gibberish. I replied, “Go Wang Chung yourself.”
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
