30 August 2019
Gotye, Iggy Azalea, Yolanda Be Cool & DCUP, Sia… the ’10s brought us a clutch of fleeting and idiosyncratic chart-topping acts from Australia. Now here, in the final year of the decade, is the most fleeting and idiosyncratic of the lot, with perhaps the most divisive track of all. Today’s globalised online world and mass movement of languages and cultures make a pop act’s country of origin less relevant than ever, but it’s entertaining to wonder how much the circumstance of geography continues to matter. Does remoteness on the map still foster some degree of ersatz local variation, the way every European country in the ’50s and ’60s had its own Elvis? Are those Aussie acts offbeat outliers in their own country too, or can we see in them some sort of definable Australian pop characteristic? Is there a causal link between stealing Trevelyan’s corn and ‘Dance Monkey’?
The collective nom de pop and the disguise video (below) made Tones And I—a woman named Toni Watson—come across as a slightly mysterious and guarded figure, which only added to the idiosyncrasy of the whole. ‘Dance Monkey’ spent nine weeks at number one in Ireland, eleven in the UK, and a whopping 24 (twenty-four) at home in Australia, plus it was constantly on the radio. People clearly loved it. And yet I remember people also hated it. Not least because both were in similar vocal registers, ‘Dance Monkey’ was something of a James Blunt’s ‘You’re Beautiful’ of its generation: convenient punchbag for pop haters; easy bantz-fodder for radio DJs; inescapable irritant for passing listeners.
One thing I will say positively about ‘Dance Monkey’ is that, as with compatriot Gotye’s ‘Somebody That I Used To Know’ and 2019 chart-topping predecessor Lil Nas X’s ‘Old Town Road’, its sparse sound is initially refreshing and is effective in catching the ear. Otherwise, there really is no getting away from the fact that the squeaky-child vocal delivery, combined with the minor-key tune and kindergarten-level sing-song repetition, makes ‘Dance Monkey’ something akin to an early-’90s UK toytown-house track like The Prodigy’s ‘Charly’ given the sad-cover treatment for a John Lewis Christmas TV ad. It gets seriously wearying remarkably quickly.
Did you know that there are actually no monkeys in the wild in Australia? Even this track may be one simian too many for them. I’m beginning to suspect that ‘Dance Monkey’ reached us not via the Internet but on a prison ship’s return voyage.
