The legacy of White Town/Your Woman

Urge Overkill- Saturation
Breeders- Last Splash
Butthole Surfers- Electric Larryland

my friend bought this album @ the heigth of it's 'popularity' only to be sorely disappointed...

i just heard this on the radio the other day.
forgot all about it. id like to see more oddball pop make it big in 08

I've been playing this song a few times lately myself! Still wonderful. Seems like it would make a good if random choice for Pop Idol (if not American Idol).

Did Jyoti ever post on ILM? Old ama regular after all?

I know he's on last fm.

Ha ha you would know that...

i'd like to see the original question applied to today - do we have more bedroom musicians now? it seems so, with the ubiquity of ableton, soft synths and high-spec pcs, but what bedroom musicians have made it big recently? (does this apply to jamie t and early streets?)

I think loads are/do, just they don't put their bedrooms onto their publicity photos etc.

Saw Jyoti DJing at some schmind night I went to on Saturday as a perverted warm-up for Fabric, he was OK - for an Indie DJ - playing MBV, De La Soul and James Brown amongst Sarah-esque jingly jangly stuff.

Very Camden Underworld 1991.

i'd like to see the original question applied to today - do we have more bedroom musicians now? it seems so, with the ubiquity of ableton, soft synths and high-spec pcs, but what bedroom musicians have made it big recently?

How about acts such as The Feeling and Lily Allen, who have gotten famous mainly because of MySpace?

Oh come on, you don't actually believe Lily Allen got famous because of MySpace, do you? Next you'll be bringing up Sandi Thom.

no geir, no to that

Your Woman being covered by ............ Wiley.

and it's great

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6119_SeiFIs

sighted with another woman in shoreditch
it's my house, i pay the mortgage

i still find it weird that the original is some kind of pop touchstone, it's barely ok! wiley's version is way better

It seemed more notable back when its sound was rare and unpopular. One of the more secretly influential singles on 00s pop in that regard, perhaps.

Jyoti Mishra = Karel Fialka

Never noticed the similarity to the Empire Strikes Back theme before...

an influence on baxter dury

My pharmacist the other day was named Jyoti, I wanted to ask her if she would be my woman but she had a wedding ring on and was pretty much all business so I was scared to try it.

spiritual precursor to umbrella

No charm and no intrigue to the Wiley version; pants.

So Wiley bottles out by getting a woman to sing the hook, then changes the original "Few Dollars More"-esque sample into some Star Wars shit. I like the woozy throb of it but fuck is it better than the original.

Actually I take back the Star Wars bit, I assume whoever made that comparison is watching the wrong movies. And Wiley sounds good, so I guess I mainly just object to the removal of gender ambiguity. Liking this quite a bit now.

Yeah, by having an actual woman sing the chorus plus the rap lyrics turn an intriguingly queer song into a yet another hetero jealousy tune. Before I clicked play I was kinda hoping Wiley himself would've sang the "I could never be your woman" chorus, that would've been interesting. Nice beat though.

(xx-post)

And I really liked the horn sample in the original, the synthesized equivalent here just doesn't carry the same emotional weight.

In the original the horn bit made it feel like the backing track was actively mocking the singer's attempts to ever be "your woman". In here the music already has the same sense of resignation as the lyrics, which make them more in line with each other, but with less drama.

http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/seconds/white-town-your-woman.htm

the second paragraph of that pretty much sums up why i can't care about the original - it just sounds so weedy and rubbish! i'd probably hate it but for the killer tune, but a killer tune can't quite make up for the rubbishness.

the "queer politics" angle is hilariously overstated and i think the straight narrative of wiley's version works much better - it's not about jealousy, it's about the girl realising that with the male character being what he is, she'll never be able to be his woman. wiley's verses are great, probably one of his best vocal performances, the production is fixed and uk-funky-friendly (first heard this song in an amazing scratcha dva set @ beyond) and it retains the killer tune. miles, miles, miles better than the original.

I don't think the sexual politics part of a song about sexual politics can be overstated really.

I agree I like the Wiley tune plenty but as a Wiley tune that "samples" "Your Woman" rather than as a cover rilly.

umm I really like the wiley verison but I don't think it's fair to say "the queer angle is overstated" in re: the original - I mean, that's an essential part of its novelty, a man stating an obvious thing & the listener wondering "what does he mean by that?" -- it was a really clever way of making a lyric engaging without being wordy/opaque/etc. take that away and make it a man-and-woman conversation-in-song and you have, y'know, a song like many other songs.

Exactly.

I like the Wiley version too, but it is less interesting for the reasons stated by John and me above. Like I said, if Wiley himself had done "I could never be your woman" bit, that might've made the song even more compelling than the original, due to the well known aversion rap music has towards queerness. (Whereas indie pop like the original song is less averse to queerness, hence making it less shocking.)

wiley doesn't even sample the original, just interpolates the tune.

idk i don't think "gay man fancies straight man" is pushing any particular boundaries or saying anything novel, but actually i'm pretty sure i think that because the narrative and characterisation is pretty weak in the original, just sketched out really unsatisfactorily (and ughhh i'd forgotten about that terrible "highbrow marxist ways" line! cringe!). plus dude sings it in such a half-assed way that i can't bring myself to care any way about his situation, it sounds no more "queer" than the demos on youtube sung by ne-yo or the-dream that they've written for a woman to sing.

the reason wiley shouldn't have done the "i could never be your woman" line is that he can't sing and it would've been terrible for that reason alone

idk i don't think "gay man fancies straight man" is pushing any particular boundaries or saying anything novel,

Well how many pop songs can you name that would touch the same subject matter? Because I can't think of any. (The only song that comes to my mind with a similar theme is Meshell Ndegeocello's "Barry Farms", but somehow I doubt it would ever have become a pop hit.) The closest thing I can think of is Prince's "If I Was Your Girlfriend", and even there Prince is merely imagining himself as her girlfriend's best female friend, not as her female lover.

the reason wiley shouldn't have done the "i could never be your woman" line is that he can't sing and it would've been terrible for that reason alone

In these days of Autotune, any rapper can sing! In fact an Autotuned chorus by Wiley might've been pretty interesting, as the robotic/androgynous nature of Autotune vocals would've emphasized the queerness of what's being said in the chorus.

i guess what i'm saying is that it doesn't matter how "queer" a song is if the singer doesn't convince or make me care?

xp i am really really glad wiley didn't do that :o

But like John said, the disappointment doesn't just come from doing away the queerness, it also comes from taking one of the best-known queer hits of recent times and recontextualizing it in a "male-and-female dialogue on relationships" scheme, which is something that has been done a zillion times in the history of popular music. The song is fine as it is, but it reminds me of those Hollywood books adaptations, where a character who's gay in the novel becomes straight (or asexual) in the movie. The movie in itself can be a good one, but you can't help feeling that there was potential for something more.

(x-post)

Well, even if the singer didn't make you care, you can't deny he was "pushing boundaries" or "doing something novel", at least in a pop context. And a lot of people cared about the song.

There's some interesting things about it on the White Town faq http://www.whitetown.co.uk/faq/ So I guess it was written to have multiple perspectives in the first place. It makes it seem like a creative writing project: Write love song with marxist/lesbian agenda!

agree with the lex here; john himself brings up the "novelty" of the original (a dope song that i remain fond of), and that's i think as far as the queer anthem angle reasonably allows before glib overweighting occurs - not to be scandalous but the whole strikes me as the sort of thing hetero dudes trying too hard to be down would get stuck on. (gay dudes for whom the song is a big deal should probably try harder). why on earth would you want wiley, of all people, to uphold that perceived tradition? don't you care about anything?