My Top 1000 Songs #586: This Beat Goes On/Switchin' To Glide
Always feels a little weird including a one-hit wonder on the list--like, c'mon, there are a million amazing Beatles and Stones and Who songs you could be going with, and you're taking up a slot on... The Kings? But, c'mon, what a great freakin' song!
Actually, two songs (from the Ontario band's 1980 debut LP The Kings Are Here), pasted together for a radio-ready single. And they make for a great package, a perfect combination of skinny-tie power pop and new wave, relentlessly gleeful hooks on both parts of the combo track. While the band apparently (according to a pretty fun YouTube documentary on the song) didn't intend the songs to be linked, the moment when they pivot from the fairly traditional bar-band boogie of "This Beat" into the deliriously catchy "Glide" (about 3 minutes in) is a wiggy little triumph as transcendent as the previously-described segue on the Dead's "China Cat Sunflower/I Know You Rider" medley, however different the tracks may be.
The single was briefly inescapable on the radio for a fleeting moment back during my first year of high school... to the point where, even though I've probably only heard it a few times since, it still pops up in my head intermittently and I can sing it from memory. Indeed, that one line from the "This Beat" half, "Hey little Donna, still wanna?" was so ridiculously earwormy that, for the past 45 years or so, I have never ONCE encountered a woman named Donna without having to bite my lip to avoid saying, "Hey little Donna, still wanna?"
One of these days, I'm not gonna bite down hard enough. Apologies in advance.
Still going, 2016:
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