Things I Will Keep #11: MEN WITHOUT HATS, Pop Goes the World

Men Without Hats
Pop Goes the World
1987, Mercury Records

This Things I Will Keep series is missing something and I think I know what it is. Other than a better writer, I mean.

So far, we’ve hung out in the thrift store bins and we’ve knocked the dust off some cool old stuff. We’ve gone glam. We’ve gone R&B. We’ve gone psychobilly. We’ve praised the goddess Bobbie Gentry. We’ve reached out to the misfit soul of Tiny Tim. We’ve reached out to the misfit psychedelic soul of The Negro Problem. We’ve loved both seasoned veterans who just want to chill out and we’ve loved hungry and dangerous young bands.

But I’ve yet to talk about anything that is truly and completely, unequivocably and absolutely 250% UNCOOL. I’ve been a little shy with you, I think. (Some might say that Tiny Tim is certifiably uncool, but I disagree.)

That ends here. It’s time to stop pulling punches. It’s time to finally reveal what a wimp I really am. It’s time to admit to the world that I am a walking bowl of egg noodles.

It’s time to say that I think that Pop Goes the World by Men Without Hats is a masterpiece and it’s one of my all-time favorite albums and I’ve been obsessed with it for almost twenty years.

Men Without Hats strike me as perfectly fine with being uncool. They’re all about pop. Verses and choruses dosed with piles of sugar. They want to give you the sweetest, creamiest, stickiest desserts you’ve ever had. They’re students of the pop song as a thing that’s carefully designed, but made to look like it was tossed off in an afternoon. Synthesizers and drum machines are the best tools invented so far for making everything perfect. Somewhere in a pile of studio electronics, keyboards, and effects is the sound in your head. Somewhere in there is your masterpiece.

I’d say that Men Without Hats found it on Pop Goes the World. I can’t think of another album that bursts with such a cute, funny, and infectious love for life as this one. Its subjects are love, death, saving the world, and pop music as a silly but essential thing in life. It’s a curious concept album that repeatedly refers to rainbows and angels, as well as stars and flight and the seasons and the sky.

In these songs, good times and good feelings are cosmic happenings. Maybe the object of your affection is nowhere near you, but you can still connect through the sky and earth. To Men Without Hats, everything is joined together via the eternal hum of the planet and the moon and all of the stars. It’s a uniquely hippie synthpop album. Check out all of those peace signs on the inner sleeve.

The production is my favorite kind of ultra-mainstream 80s junk. It’s busy and swirled all over with synthesizers and programming and hairspray. It doesn’t sound like a band. There’s some electric guitar here and there. Maybe a real piano every now and then. Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull contributes some breezy flute work to one song. Overall though, this feels like an album made with toys. Every song sounds like candy. It favors cheap, silly, cartoonish tones. It’s drenched in hot pink and electric blue. (“Keyboards & electronics” are credited on the sleeve to “A Little Baby”.)

Men Without Hats paw at you like a puppy. They want to be loved and they’re willing to work for it, sculpting each song to angel food cake perfection.

It’s all but impossible to enjoy this and be a cynical asshole while it’s on.

That’s the difference between pop and rock, I think. Rock allows you to be a dirtbag if you want while pop wants you to skip down a cookie crumble street on a cupcake planet in a marshmallow universe.

The Velvet Underground and The Stooges give you all the room in the world to be a cynical asshole. The Rolling Stones, too.  Even The Beatles, despite Paul McCartney’s best efforts, allow you to be a cynical asshole if you feel like it.

Men Without Hats, meanwhile, go over the top to provide none of that. You’re either happy “in the middle of a million rainbows” or you’re not. But they hope that you are.

In true pop fashion, its big, conk-you-over-the-head singles are at the very beginning of each side. After a brief, theatrical intro, the title track kicks in and announces right away that this album’s ambitions are global. Pop goes the WORLD. Vocalist Ivan Doroschuck sings to everybody and he wants us to know that Men Without Hats aren’t a band. They’re an idea that’s made up of simple parts. (“Johnny play guitar/ Jenny play bass / Ain’t nobody couldn’t take their place”. Also, as far as I know, Johnny and Jenny are made-up characters, not actual players on this record, despite the credits on the sleeve.)

In the lovely “On Tuesday”, the spring flowers bloom to the tune of Ian Anderson’s woodwinds, and love is in the air. I start sneezing from the pollen just listening to it.

“Bright Side of the Sun” is a quick voice-and-piano lead up to the luscious and full-bodied “O Sole Mio”, but I’ve always loved how Ivan Doroschuk sings the lines “We’ll laugh at all the silly things that we both said and done/ Step into forever/ On the bright side of the sun”. I’ve said and done a lot of silly things. I’m not ready to laugh at ALL of them yet, but I’m working on it.

“O Sole Mio” is big, sweeping, and full of drama. The sun is still shining, but sometimes life is a struggle. That struggle continues on the beautiful “Lose My Way” before the mood picks up again on “The Real World”, a song full of yet more love and angels and rainbows, as well as a white bread funk groove that won’t quit.

Men Without Hats are smart enough to know that a truly happy album needs a little sadness in it. Life isn’t perfect. Not everything works out. Before you can achieve catharsis, you need some low place from which to bounce back.

The beginning of side 2 of an album is the perfect place to bounce back. That’s where the sugar-pop of “Moonbeam” comes in to take us away. The object of Ivan’s affection is on a moon beam while he’s on star. “No matter where you are, I can always see that far,” he sings. Also, “Hey, I was only trying to say/ You’re a million miles away/ I can feel you dancing anyway.” In the world of this album, lovers can be connected despite distances impossible to traverse. That’s because to Men Without Hats everything is connected in some natural, spiritual sense.

Also, I’ve heard “Moonbeam” a thousand times, but it’s only just now occurred to me that the other person in the song might even be dead.

That might explain why the righteously anthemic “In the Name of Angels” brings, yes, more angels (along with more rainbows while they’re at it). Also, Johnny and Jenny are back. “Johnny loves Jenny like the earth and sun/ and in the middle of a moment they will all be one”. It reads like a trite statement about everlasting love, but Doruschuk sings it like he’s arguing a point. It makes me wanna jump around.

The quick mournful instrumental “La Valese D’Eugenie” ramps us up to another top-shelf swinger, “Jenny Wore Black”, a catchy pop whirlwind that I’m starting to think might be a funeral song in disguise behind the happy hooks and uptempo thump.  “Jenny wore black/ Jenny wore white/ Jenny was real/ But almost not quite/ Jenny was here/ She was almost inside”. I think that Jenny here might be an angel watching over her own burial.

By the delirious “Walk on Water”, all illusions are crumbling to the tune of yet another uptempo synth rampage, another anthem, another song that gets me moving. It sounds like a band’s last words. Maybe even a generation’s last words. As the roof falls down, Doroschuk sings “They said we could walk on water/ They said we should knock on wood/ We did none of these things and they said we could sing/ So we sang about falling in love”.

Where do you go after that except for “The End (Of the World)”? It’s a song that wonders where all of this shit that we’re going through is taking us. Is there really another place to go after all of this is over? After I die, do I get to reunite with the ones I love? Do I get to hear my favorite songs? Do I maybe ascend to some higher state where I don’t care about any of that stuff? I’m not sure. Where I’m at right now is already high enough to make a simple guy like me dizzy.

(Another thought that only just occurred to me: The title of the album has a double meaning. In the title track, “Pop Goes the World” seems to address the power of pop music as a force in the world. However, to “pop” also means to burst. Explode. End with a bang.)

Sometimes I think that those are life’s only real questions. I don’t know the answers to them. Neither does this album. The world’s most well-read scholar of any religion doesn’t know shit either because they haven’t died, yet. They’re just speculating like a sports commentator telling us how the Cardinals might fare next season. Men Without Hats are as good a guru as any. At least they had a hit song.

If you ask me, this album should have scored several more hits, but it didn’t. The world was done with Men Without Hats by 1987. “The Safety Dance” is such a perfect one-hit-wonder song. It’s catchy and stupid, a total novelty. Why spoil it with a brilliant album about the heart-wrenching questions that keep some of us up at night?

I like that Men Without Hats make no attempt to answer those questions. They are as confused as the rest of us. Their response to eternity’s yawning void is to write upbeat songs about it. Celebrate life, celebrate death, celebrate uncertainty. Live for the ones who are gone and let your love expand to include everything. Until it all connects. Open your eyes wide (like the baby on the striking album cover) and meet the world as an innocent. When anything is possible, maybe what’s ahead is cooler and greater than we’ve even imagined. Maybe there is no such thing as death, just the earth reclaiming our bodies. Maybe love really is all we have to offer. And maybe to love a person is, by extension, also to love nature and the earth and–

And what THE HELL am I rambling about?

I blame the sugar high.