(The Hit Hammer Requests are requests from people who want me to review songs that did NOT hit #1, but still charted on the Hot 100. Right now, there is only one request per person, but if you're reading this, and you haven't already sent me a request, feel free to do so. I will try to do a request once a week, while still continuing my main project of reviewing each #1 song on the Hot 100)
Eddy Grant - "Electric Avenue"
Peak Date: July 1, 1983
Peak Position: #2
#1 Song At That Time: "Flashdance... What a Feeling" by Irene Cara
Requestor: David Scheibe
In 1981, there were the Brixton riots. This was a chaotic mess of tensions in the streets of Brixton, South London, which dealt with racist policing. Brixton was a place that was suffering from serious economy issues, resulting in unemployment for a vast majority of the African-Caribbean community. In events leading up to the riots, some black youths died in a fire while attending a house party, which police claimed to be an accident, but there was wide speculation it was actually an act of arson. Anyway I'm not going to go into great detail about that, because no one clicked on this to read up on riots and crap. That's stuff we've already seen this year. Long story short, events similar to that house party incident, on top of the growing feelings of being discriminated against, lead the black community in Brixton in getting fed up. They were tired of the handling of such incidents by police, and they clashed. They clashed hard.
So what does any of this have to do with "Electric Avenue"? Eddy Grant, a Guyanese-British singer who had been around for a few years, was living in the U.K. during the riots. After hearing about them on the news, he became outraged at the way things were being handled by the authorities in Brixton. Musicians always like to respond to real-world events by writing songs concerning them, and that's exactly what Grant did when he wrote "Electric Avenue". Most people, including me, never paid close attention to the lyrics of the song. It was always just a fun song to dance and/or sing to. But taking a look at the lyrics, it makes sense. The narrator of the song stresses on how hard he works, but him and his comrades still can't feed their children. Most of the song doesn't deal with immense racism, but rather how much poverty the black community of Brixton was in. They felt they were in this situation because of their skin color, and they had had enough. The chorus "We gonna rock down to Electric Avenue/And then we'll take it higher" is about the rioters taking their "work" down Electric Avenue, a main street in Brixton.
"Electric Avenue" was one of the first big music videos on MTV to feature a black artist, which is part of what helped it shoot up to #2 on the pop charts. Another big reason is how irresistibly fun the song is, despite the true meaning of the song. Grant's accent is fun to shout a long with, though his thick accent has led me to get some of the words wrong. The "good God" and the "Out in the street!" that he throws in (possibly improvised) are good identity tags for it, and along with that addictive chorus it remains a fun new-wave/funk stomper from a truly amazing time in music's history. In the U.K., the song might have struck a chord with people because of their agreement with Grant's message. In the U.S., that's a little bit harder for me to imagine. I think in America, people just liked the new wave synths, Grant's fun English/Caribbean ad-libs and of course that chorus. That chorus is something that will stick in your head all day. It carried weight back in the 1980s as a song with a powerful message. Today, it's simply just an awesome song.
GRADE: 9/10
(Thanks for the request David!)
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