The legacy of White Town/Your Woman

(See, I didn't even mention B***'s "L****")

But as the technology to allow people to make professional sounding recordings on their home computers becomes more prevalent, 'bedroom' singles will certainly flourish more.

Re. Jyoti Mishra - I'm surprised he doesn't post here. I think it's the kind of board he'd like.

(the moment I realised Jyoti was a spiritual soulmate, incidentally, was when he reviewed the singles in Melody Maker and said of some forgotten band "They're from High Wycombe, I wonder if they know Howard Jones?", which shows that, like me, he's the type who memorises things nobody wants to remember and gets a bit embarrassed about knowing them.)

Nobody's mentioned that Alizee "Moi Lolita" has the same base/rythymn bed as Your Woman. Or maybe it's been on Pop-Eye?

Re: the HoJo comment, EVERYONE knows that HoJo comes from High bloody Wycombe. I was taken out to dinner by US PRs and record company people a few years ago when interviewing the Cure in Oxford, and sho'nuff we got to the Indian restaurant to find HoJo and lovely wife in attendance at the table. I was so embarrassed, I thought I was going to ask if he stil fed his dog veggie pet food...

Good to see Suzy keeping up her usual accepting attitude to the whole of the UK and absence of metropolitan snobbery, isn't it?

:-(

why do you like it?

is there any cd you see more often in used bins for $2.99 than the white town full length?

Good point though: production vslues can in theory be roughly the same now for the bedroom amateur and the stoodio professional. What difference is left other than marketing?

-- bill stevens (bscrubbin...), September 8th, 2004 8:53 PM.

Totally. I remember thinking that when it came out.

I could never be Your Wookie.

I am from High Wycombe Alba. I have fond memories.

(I also bought Tasmin Archer's Great Expectations for the same price. Pretty much the same assessment -- not a bad price for a CD single with some inessentials tacked onto the end.)

I also had the dubious pleasure of promoting some gigs at The White Horse.

I was always scared to touch anything when in the dressing room as everyone was painfully aware that it doubled up as a room for 'private dances' when the strippers were on in the daytimes.

Still, it was worth it just to see Hrvatski and Knifehandchop confuse the fuck out of the general Wycombe public.

And, as Dr. C points out, Scorpion Records is a winner.

Listening to the album just now for the first time in a long while, enjoyable stuff. But Dan nailed it why "Your Woman" is so sharp on its own. :-)

http://www.whitetown.co.uk/archives/2005/06/tyler-james-covers-your-woman/

His cover of "Your Woman" is crap, though.

Okay I need to hear this immediately.

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?

ZeroTolerancePoisoN (1 day ago) Show Hide0
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its funny cause the man is saying i could never be your woman

it's about the girl realising that with the male character being what he is, she'll never be able to be his woman.

this is wrong too however; the presiding miscalculation so far on this thread is solely reading the new version from the perspective of its chorus rather than from wiley's. the chorus acts as a pivot, startling in its stilled matter-of-factness ("now you're feeling the pain - but you're not crying") (and notice how much more the "i guess" does here, combined with the the slight alteration to "what they say is true" - a same old story, borne out by being played off the familiarity of the sample in itself), to wiley's awareness of his slowly entwining self-deception and the pulsing nimbus of numbness that doesnt quite fully submerge it.

i love the almost out-of-body dawning montage of paranoaic perspectives in the second verse especially: "air freshener / wild orchid / what would he get if she caught him? ... turn around, ignore it / look around like you never saw it". ("quick jump the queue - no hiding" is a great line in context too.)

i've said this before i think but wiley - perhaps by virtue of his intrinsic tortured life story history with grime - has a unique quality of always seeming slightly detached from material that isn't his bread and butter, that isn't incongruous or opportunistic in as much it has the effect of turning whatever it is he's on into a sort of distanced-but-not soundtrack music. almost as if he could have said what he says on 'your woman' just as easily on 'wearing my rolex', because it's all "wiley has a realisation while he's out clubbing" music. what tedious bit of cinetheory am i grasping for here - metadiagesis? yah, if you like.

x-post - The shift in meaning would seem to be somewhat less that "Every Breath You Take" --> "I'll Be Missing You". However I'm hanging out for Tinchy's next single which interpolates "This Charming Man", chorus sung by Shola Ama about Tinchy.

Most interesting thing about Jyoti's original is not the narrative perspective, but rather the cultural response to iti it got macho rugby boys singing "I could never be your woman" to each other. I wager Wiley's version won't.

really shocks me a little how truculent so many people (that i know,that i've read) have been about taking this song on its own terms; is it so hard to understand in 2010 that a sample does not automatically mean a linear cover version? what is it really that people are instinctively drawing the battle lines against here?

i take the point that the more popular shy fx hiphouse mix maybe steamrollers the whole thing a little, but still the value is plain to hear.

i think it's just freighting the original with may more importance than it deserves. i'm trying to think of an example of a song i really, really loved being sampled and jarring in its new context but i can't right now.

Most interesting thing about Jyoti's original is not the narrative perspective, but rather the cultural response to iti it got macho rugby boys singing "I could never be your woman" to each other.

― exploding angel vagina (Scik Mouthy), Saturday, 9 January 2010 15:57 (1 month ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is one of the most staggeringly banal and useless received wisdoms of all time btw.

ikr? rugby boys a) sing anything b) the camper the better

xp oh yeah sure no doubt i've been at the wrong end of a cheap grabby sample hundreds of times (and i've been wrong about being at the wrong end too) but this particular example with the wiley cut so evidently, basically has its own different things going on that i'm just a bit gobsmacked. it seems like no one's even listened to the thing once, let alone expended an iota of the deep thought they claim have done on the white town original.

http://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2014/02/white-town-your-woman/

http://www.godisinthetvzine.co.uk/2017/12/12/white-town-release-woman-1917/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QVIjNquTJU

The original is perfect as it is - it was great to see someone flying the synthpop flag in the '90s and not being embarrassed about it.

Is it "Your Woman" being used in the advert for The Eternals? Sort of hoping it is (so Jyoti gets a big cheque) but suspect it's just the same sample??

It's in a Dua Lipa song, right?

To answer the question just above: yes. Meantime, Todd in the Shadows does a One Hit Wonderland on it and mentions Tom Ewing along the way, thus tying back to the protohistory of this site, etc. etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRYO6-gNGzQ