Not Fade Away 1969: I Want You Back, by The Jackson Five.
I want to dance again. So put the needle on the record. Listen to the piano trill, follow the clipped funk guitar and wait for that voice to kick in. And then watch me move.
Here’s the thing. I want to speak up for pop in this blog. Part of me actually thought about picking The Archies’ Sugar Sugar in 1969 because it’s so candy sweet, because it’s possibly the first record I really remember from childhood and because I could happily argue against the grain of the sixties notion – derived from the Beatles – that you had to write your own material.
But to be honest I Want You Back allows me to do all of those things and more.
This is my idea of pop. In fact I’d say this may be the greatest pop song ever made. One huge whoop of joy, even if the lyrics are all heartache and heartbreak.
If our idea of the sixties lives on in the ambition and adventure of the Beatles and the darkness and dissolution of the Stones and the Velvet Underground, then it’s also here. Here in this record that wants you to move, this record that reminds you that pop music can make you feel alive and be thrilled by that feeling. This record that reminds you why you – why I – fell in love with music in the first place. Because it makes you feel good. And possibly no record that I’ve chosen so far – apart maybe from Tutti Frutti – makes me feel as good as this one.
There’s always a danger that we reduce pop to the equivalent of an English Literature exam question. You know the kind of thing: “What is the writer trying to convey in this lyric?” There’s a tendency to perceive seriousness as superior in some way. I’m not sure I believe that, though. The pleasures of pop don’t need any academic endorsement. They never did.
And yes I utterly believe pop can talk about anything. That’s one of its joys. But it can also say nothing and still matter.
The facts about I Want You Back are that Motown signed a group of brothers from Gary, Indiana, that Berry Gordy himself got personally involved in finding the right vehicle for them, and worked with Deke Richards, Fonce Mizel and Freddie Perren who had previously written for Gladys Knight and the Pips. I Want You Back was the result.
And then, of course, an 11-year-old boy stepped up to the microphone.
I could leave it there. At that moment before you hear Michael Jackson for the first time. But that would mean I can’t talk about what he does at the breakdown, the way he goes uh-huh and then screams at the top of his voice “All I want, All I need” and pulls the word go out and out like you’d pull salt water taffy.
Does he understand what he’s singing about? Does he know what “one long sleepless night” might feel like? I doubt it, not then, but it doesn’t matter. He is finding out how he can push and twist and stretch his voice, finding out how to inhabit the song, live in it, shape it to his own ends. It’s a great pop song anyway, but Jackson’s performance makes it better.
When it comes down to it music is sound. We can invest it with meaning and chart its range and depths but it’s still sound. Some sounds grate. Some sounds thrill. This sound thrills. And yes it makes you – makes me - want to dance. Isn’t that the best thing music can do?
Other contenders
I Wanna Be Your Dog, The Stooges
Suspicious Minds, Elvis Presley
Way to Blue, Nick Drake
Gimme Shelter, The Rolling Stones
Space Oddity, David Bowie
Walk On By, Isaac Hayes
Breakfast in Bed, Dusty Springfield
And the best-selling UK single of 1969: Sugar Sugar, The Archies
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