![]() ![]() Steele and Cox, whose last names look pretty funny together, learned that the Beat had broken up when they saw a news story that their bandmates Dave Wakeling and Ranking Roger, the Beat’s two singers, had signed a record deal under a new name. In practice, they work an uncanny sort of magic - the type of magic that only chameleons can make. ![]() On paper, none of those things make sense together. In “She Drives Me Crazy,” you can hear all these little echoes of soul and funk and acid house, and it all comes welded to a big, mean guitar riff that’s been mechanized to the point where it’s almost industrial. Those guys moved on to retro-soul, and then they tried to make a Prince record. It’s a song from three guys who’d come up on the British two-tone ska scene of the late ’70s and early ’80s. The song has no fixed genre, and that’s probably because the musicians who made it had no fixed genre, either. Without chameleons, you don’t get something like “She Drives Me Crazy.” “She Drives Me Crazy,” the first #1 hit from the British trio Fine Young Cannibals, comes from nowhere and everywhere at once. ![]() ![]() 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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