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“Don’t turn around, ‘cause you’re gonna see my heart
breakin’. Don’t turn around, I don’t want you seeing me cry. Just walk away,
it’s tearing me apart that you’re leaving, but I’m letting you go.”
Ace of Base probably doesn’t generate a lot of emotional recall
for many people. It’s not an album of soulful ballads lamenting heartbreak or
loss. The electronic music feels pretty devoid of actual instruments and the
voices ring like a precursor to auto-tuning. But The Sign, released in 1993, was a self-imposed, elusive object for me. The pop
songs were catchy, but as a moody youngster determined to get into Guinness for
longest held scowl was unable to leave the store with such cheerful crap music.
When my dad bought a portable CD player, he took me to The
Wall at the Echelon Mall to buy a CD. I could only buy 1, so my decision took a
long time. My dad was ready in about 10 minutes: Iron Butterfly. But I was
torn. This was my first CD purchase, so it had to be a good one: Ace of Base or
the soundtrack to West Side Story. You can see my dilemma – that my taste in
music vacillated between terrible pop and carefully crafted musicals.
From that moment on, I would look for the title at ever
music store – The Wall, Tunes, Sam Goody – kicking myself for not letting my
dad buy me that CD. As part of the A section, my CD browsing, conveniently,
would begin with picking Ace of Base out of the rack, looking at the front to
confirm that it was the right CD, then pretending to scroll the back of the
case for the songlist I knew by heart:
1 All that she wants
2 Don’t turn around
3 Young and proud
4 The sign
5 Living in danger
6 Dancer in a daydream
7 Wheel of fortune
8 Waiting for magic (Total remix 7”)
9 Happy nation
10 Voluez-vou danser
11 My mind (Mindless mix)
12 All that she wants (Banghra version)
Fearful that someone cooler than I could ever be was
watching me hold this plastic case of gross pop music, I would replace it in
the rack and move onto a cooler section, perhaps pretending to care about
Nirvana albums. All the while, as I bounced alphabetically through the racks
flushed with embarrassment for my uncool music taste, I would be doing my
unpatented CD math:
cost per song = total cost of album/number of songs
This simple formula should provide the justification for an
album purchase, a formula I still use to this day, actually. However, The Sign posed confused the simplicity
of the equation:
1. The radio played the songs all the time, so why invest in
the CD when I could just hear the song for free?
2. My friend had a copy of the CD, so I could always listen
to hers, if I could muster the courage to admit to wanting to listen to it.
3. Stephanie’s band on Full
House covered The Sign, which,
frankly, just put me off the music all together.
Yet, even in my later ironic but still scowling phase, I
remained resistant to buying the disc. Probably because I didn’t ironically
enjoy Ace of Base; I wasn’t laughing at the dancey beats or awkward lyrics (ie,
“all that she wants is another baby”; what?) like I did with Lindsay Lohan or Ashlee
Simpson. Perhaps it is my love of Abba that makes me love Ace of Base.
So when I was at my local Goodwill last week and saw Ace of
Base, The Sign, priced at $.99, I
knew I couldn’t keep up the sham. I needed to hear that slightly off-key vocal
spewing uncomfortable French lyrics to raver music. To round out my uncool
music purchase that day, I added Madonna’s Immaculate
Collection and Evanescence’s Fallen.
Clearly, I’ve lost my bid for longest held frown.
