Cushman had been to see Roxette in Sweden, and he’d bought Look Sharp! While he was back in Minneapolis, Cushman took his copy of Look Sharp! to the local pop station KDWB. Gessle didn’t think “The Look” should be a single, but it came out in Sweden and peaked at #6 on the charts over there.Īround the same time, Dean Cushman, an American exchange student who was spending a year studying in Stockholm, flew back home for Christmas break. Gessle’s whole idea for Roxette was that Fredriksson would sing all the lead vocals, but Fredriksson’s voice was too big for “The Look.” Gessle sang it himself, with Fredriksson chipping in on the chorus. For a few months, Gessle didn’t even play the song for Fredriksson.
The sixth was “The Look.” Gessle intended to write “The Look,” the opening track from Roxette’s 1988 sophomore album Look Sharp!, as “a ZZ Top type of thing.” Judged on those merits, “The Look” is a failure. In their first few years, Roxette landed five singles in their homeland’s top 10. Roxette’s 1986 debut album Pearls Of Passion went to #2 on the Swedish charts. “Neverending Love,” a neat little piece of frothy and generic mid-’80s pop, was a #3 hit in Sweden. The glorious Scandinavian strain of English-as-a-second-language pop-music silliness runs right through Roxette. (When Gessle was born, the #1 single in America was the Platters’ “ Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.” Fredriksson was six months older than Gessle, and the Hot 100 didn’t yet exist when she was born.) In a lot of ways, Roxette played a crucial bridge role in the history of Sweden’s still-thriving pop industry, connecting the global dominance of former Number Ones artists ABBA to the mathematically precise computer-pop that this column will eventually discuss in detail. But we’ll get to that.īy the time Roxette made their American breakthrough, both Gessle and his bandmate Marie Fredriksson were 30, and they were both veterans of Sweden’s music scene. In this case, fate took the form of an American exchange student who brought a CD home, gave it to his local pop radio station, and helped launch what would become a massive global pop act. Gessle had tried to break through in America once before, years earlier, and his attempt had failed miserably. Roxette were big stars in Sweden, and they were total unknowns everywhere else on the planet.
“The Look” was, to put things mildly, an unlikely hit. Trust a Swede to refine and perfect the fine art of pop-song lyrical gibberish. I really enjoy word games.” In this case, the game must be utterly stripping words of anything resembling meaning, turning them into pure sound. 1 Hits, Gessle makes some attempt at explaining those lyrics: “It’s a sort of Marc Bolan-ish type of lyric, which I like. Since Gessle didn’t think “The Look” would be anything but filler material on the second Roxette album - an album that would presumably never be released in the English-speaking world - Gessle never came up with new lyrics. Per Gessle, one half of the Swedish duo Roxette, wrote the music for “The Look,” and then he added a bunch of nonsense lyrics as placeholders. As songs lyrics? Song lyrics that are printed on the cover art? They almost work as a protest against the very idea of language itself. The lyrics for “The Look” would be utterly flummoxing in any context, even if you just encountered them as refrigerator poetry. Anyone trying to decode this stuff is just going to feel stupid. Those words don’t just resist interpretation they actively repel it. That is some high-grade meaninglessness right there. Savor the images that pop into your mind. I want you to take a second here and really appreciate what those words are doing. Or, listen, I can’t stop myself: “She’s a miracle man/ Loving is the ocean/ Kissing is the wet sand/ She’s got the look.” Or even: “Fire in the ice, naked to the T-bone is a lover’s disguise/ Banging on the head drum/ Shaking like a wild bull/ She’s got the look.” Or: “Heavenly bound, ’cause heaven’s got a number/ When she’s spinning me around, kissing is a color/ Her loving is a wild dog/ She’s got the look.” Consider: “Walking like a man/ Hitting like a hammer/ She’s a juvenile scam/ Never was a quitter/ Tasty like a raindrop/ She’s got the look.” On record, the lyrics for “The Look” are confoundingly silly. For Roxette’s “The Look,” a song that’s positively ecstatic in its own meaninglessness, it’s a downright surreal decision.
#Roxette joyride lyric full#
It would be weird for anyone to put the full text of any song’s lyrics on a single cover. They printed the lyrics on the cover of the single. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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