Trying to catch your heart is like trying to catch your heart is like trying to catch your---
My internet life occasionally involves walking into a silly maze of pop culture associations for no good reason. Yesterday on Bluesky my pal April posted about a song she liked from her childhood in 1989. I thought, "I, too, like this song." Then I went to listen to it. Then I worked backward from her post to learn that people are currently arguing about the quality of 1989's pop music in the United States. This matters or it doesn't. I approve of the arguments and scroll through them all, but I don't care too much what people think about my taste in anything anymore. In 1989 I was working in an indie record store and the lessons of punk rock retail were 1. Don't argue with people about music. They will dig in their heels and never be convinced to switch from Y to Z because Z happens to be cooler/better/whatever and 2. Play Boredoms' Soul Discharge in the store but don't be harsh to people who buy a Bon Jovi CD and finally 3. Thank them for their purchase and tell them to come again.
The song April posted about is Boy Meets Girl's "Waiting For a Star to Fall". It was a big hit. It was an especially big hit on Adult Contemporary radio stations and VH1. The people involved in Boy Meets Girl, a married couple at the time and songwriting partners, wrote some big hits for Whitney Houston. Like "How Will I Know" and "I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)." Those kind of big hits. They released some other singles as Boy Meets Girl but this one was the one that went global.
It's as solid a song as those Whitney Houston hits and follows a similar template. An instrumental intro, a verse, an adjunct verse that builds to the chorus, the chorus, then all of that again, then a bridge with a big sax solo, then it builds again to the chorus, repeated and riffed on. The end. It's big and sweet and very catchy. In addition to the mandatory mid-song sax solo, the instrumentation involves gentle wood block percussion and that, in the late 80s, is how you knew it was for grown-ups who wanted to rock lightly.
Regarding VH1: I lived in a big old house with several roommates and the rent was stupidly low. One of them had money, so he paid for cable TV and he loved VH1 and its roster of artists: Basia, Julia Fordham, 10,000 Maniacs, Toni Childs, Sting. You imagine the characters on thirtysomething chilling to VH1. Eventually he moved out and a punk rock friend who booked bands moved in. Not the punk-house-with-cigarettes kind of friend. The neat, orderly, use-a-coaster, do-not-mishandle-my-Fugazi-records kind. We kept the cable and still watched VH1 even when bands crashed at the house. It soothed everyone. Boy Meets Girl was in heavy rotation there.
The video for "Waiting For a Star to Fall" is sepia, which is also how you knew something was for grown-ups in the late 80s. Whichever Peggy Olson-esque creative director of the early 90s invented "the touch the feel of cotton" for the organic textile industry got her ideas from this very wholesome, married-with-children video. You buy your own groceries to this song and you feel satisfied. It will be your peanut butter and your grape jelly.**
The entire clip is a guide to normal heterosexual white everything. No one is showing skin. There are marriage pranks (I'm soaked! Oh you.) Some kids on some kind of playdate with big bubbles. A scene in a barn? Another one at a beach? Are they renovating the barn for a home recording studio? This is real estate purchased with Whitney royalties and they're getting their hands dirty fixing it up. A dusty rug is beaten. Like too dusty. In a barn for no good reason dusty. You ruined that rug leaving it in the goddamn barn. You don't care because life is good.
I love this video. I love this song. These people literally sang backup for Deniece Williams' "Let's Hear It For The Boy," which I think confers upon its participants the gift of living in a constant winning state of upbeat happiness. They even won at divorce by splitting up and continuing to work together. This song and video contain all of that residual energy.
Then there's this lull.
People forget. There is not a follow-up hit. In the 1990s no one is really talking about Boy Meets Girl. They talk about Boy Krazy for a brief moment but that is an entirely different thing. The music buying citizens of the United States more or less forget that soft pop exists for several years, Natalie Imbruglia notwithstanding. Agitated guitar music and hip-hop take over. House/techno/drum and bass/hardcore exist in dark nighttime spaces.
The early-to-mid 2000s - "Call on Me" happens. There is a video and it's hilarious, perfectly cast and straddling the line separating irony and horniness. As a song, it's a Daft Punk-style loop of a line from Steve Winwood's "Valerie" – naturally, considering its origins* – but dumbed way down. There was no other choice. People do get paid for being clever in this life, but not that often.
The moment following "Call on Me," dance music producers calling themselves Cabin Crew and some other dance music producers calling themselves Sunset Strippers, sensing an opportunity, decide to chop up, sample, and loop various components of "Waiting For a Star to Fall," and release them at approximately the same time.
Now. Why? Everyone knows why. There are brief moments in good pop songs that you want to hear again and again. The parts that you return the needle to, or rewind to, or whatever. You want to absorb that part so you never forget how it feels. These are the parts of songs that turn into earworms. You love that itch and you want to scratch it over and over. "Waiting For a Star to Fall" has more than its share of those moments. Dance music pounces on those moments, turns them into discrete elements, and devours them. It was just this particular hook-filled song's turn.
In the battle of Cabin Crew vs Sunset Strippers, there's no real winner. The tracks have similar names, and for their video accompaniment even steal components of the archly sexy "Call On Me" clip. Both are the sort of Euro-Australian dance pop that scores big in other countries and can't get arrested in the United States but that nevertheless lives very comfortably on YouTube thanks to the libidinal adolescent silliness of the videos. For Boy Meets Girl it meant, I assume, another infusion of cash, and I like that for them. They got to keep sharing custody of that barn.
Meanwhile, at nearly exactly the same time, Scottish music producer Mylo releases his own sample-driven track, "In My Arms" and it's a lot more laid back than the other two. The official video is the visual equivalent of a looped sample, with a young, cool, rent's-due couple enacting a Groundhog Day romance. It's a travelogue of downtown Los Angeles and Echo Park liquor stores. They'll break up down the road and never see each other again.
The next 18-ish years: Dance music producers refrain from making more tracks based on Boy Meets Girl's "Waiting For a Star to Fall."
2025: Oh good, some dance music producers calling themselves Bingo Players & Disco Fries release "For a Star to Fall" and crank it up all over again. It's understandable if you have lost count. I suppose until we have as many versions of this as we have Spider-Man(s) then it can just keep happening. But.
At the end of the year, film critics are often expected to list their 10 best films of the year. I dislike doing that and the moment various employers stopped paying me to do it, I, in turn, also stopped. List-ranking any and all sorts of pop culture products became a go-to shit-gig of many freelance journalists over the past 25 years, myself included, and I will never do it again unle$$ $omeone really a$k$ me nicely. Except for now, where I will rank all the Boy Meets Girl-adjacent product, from worst to first. No one asked for this. I'm doing it, and it's free.
Worst: Bingo Players & Disco Fries - "For a Star to Fall." Dear Mr. Thefty Jones, LLM, please make me some kind of song. Any song will do. I do not enjoy knowing this is in the world.
Next worst: Sunset Strippers - "Falling Stars." I like a sample to be short and looped into infinity. I want to be driven next-to-insane with repetition, I want to feel like I've reached the end of meaning, then I want the song to break my will and, then, out of nowhere, lift me up again. (See: Together's 11-minute crazy-making "So Much Love to Give") This song does not do that.
Second best: Cabin Crew - "Star2Fall." Jaunty stylized title. Vintage video stewardess exploitation. Of the three largely soundalike versions, this one has the tightest grip on the samples. Short. Over quickly. They namecheck themselves. Uselessness that almost feels useful.
Best: Mylo. No one can afford real estate anymore. This song is for shoplifting your groceries.
*Thomas Bangalter and DJ Falcon created this track first. They recorded "So Much Love to Give" under the name "Together." In a way, most of the rest of this stuff is their fault.
**see also: Mare Winningham, St. Elmo's Fire. RIP VH1. That is, if it's actually gone. I didn't bother to find out. If it's still around then, RIP VH1 anyway.
