the style council perhaps the best pop group

#The style council perhaps the best pop group full

You might wonder how it’s possible to get a top ten showing on the charts while making such strident statements about society, even if it is wrapped in a stunning pop sheen. This is a bright, bouncy song about not taking it anymore, a shining soul-pop gem about being tired of being oppressed.

#The style council perhaps the best pop group full

But, in the mid-80s, leader Paul Weller, who had gained some similar thematic traction when he fronted The Jam, demonstrated his full array of pop smarts in this new musical milieu, along with the political content to be found in his lyrics to go along with them. This would go south for them later in the decade when they strayed a bit too far, and when popularity and sales began to wane. Thematically speaking, they’d aim pretty high too, often bordering on the polemical, and sometimes into downright pretension. This artistic fluidity of the band was extensive, mixing Northern soul, jazz, mod-rock, and even early hip-hop sounds. Our Favourite Shop puts the band into their sharpest focus. The result was the creation of a sort of pop music political manifesto. The Style Council helped to pioneer this approach to writing politically informed material as established on their earlier album Café Bleu aka My Ever Changing Moods as it was known in North America. This was during a time when social and economic issues were particularly polarized in Britain, and in North America as well, which may explain the political undercurrents in this song about being at the end of one’s rope, with nothing left to do but rage against the machine, so to speak. The single appeared in October of 1984 on the British charts where it reached a respectable top ten showing. It’s “Shout To The Top”, a single which appeared on the UK album Our Favourite Shop, and on the US album Internationalists, both released in their respective markets in 1985.

Here’s a clip of left-leaning young soul rebels and bona fide pop collective The Style Council.