1993 Ace Of Base: All That She Wants

Though hindsight tends to lump them in with the rest of the nineties Eurodance merchants en-bloc, in truth Sweden's Ace Of Base operated outside the parameters of the genre, basing their sound on chunky beatbox reggae rather than a hip hop/house hybrid. 'All That She Wants' is as good example of this as any, running as it does on a dance skank augmented by doomy horn and spaghetti western whistles. As a floorfiller it does its job, which is just as well seeing as Linn Berggren's flat, exchange student accent has all the neutral engagement of a news reader as she throws the lyrics against the tune in a way that suggests she has no idea what she is actually singing.

Maybe she doesn't - 'All That She Wants' has a double vagueness in that, taken on face value, it's a song about a predatory woman embarking on a series of one night stands solely with the aim to get impregnated. Take it at the level it was meant to be taken and it's a song about a predatory woman embarking on a series of one night stands (with the opening "she leads a lonely life" itself being a vague commentary that can be taken as being either the reason for, or the result of her cavalier attitude to relationships).

But on both levels it's a clumsily executed face off between the awkwardly written ("So if you are in sight and the day is right, she's the hunter you're the fox"), awkwardly sang ("It's not a day for wuh-herk") verses and the relentless nuclear explosion of the chorus. Relentless, now that's a good word to describe 'All That She Wants' - lacking depth or originality, it's main hook steamrollers over it's own shortcomings until it becomes the song's whole raison d'etre, and though I can't find anything of much merit in it, I'm as happy as the next man to sing along. The sign of a good pop song? I guess it must be, though for the want of a nail or two it could have been a great one.