Songoftheday 8/7/13 - If you wanna be rich, you got to be a bitch...

Laid Back - "White Horse"
from the album Keep Smiling (1983)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #26 (two weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 4

Today's Song of the Day is by Danish synthpop duo Laid Back, whose members Tim Stahl and John Guldberg struck out from a band they were in together in Copenhagen in the 70s. After releasing their debut album in 1981, which gave the pair a chart-topping record in their own country, "Maybe I'm Crazy", they released "Sunshine Reggae", which was a worldwide hit single.

But while that song went nowhere in America, the B-side, "White Horse", caught on like a drug. The minimalist Kraftwerk-lite number, written and co-produced by the duo, attempted to dissuade you from doing the titular vice, a slang word for heroin. But by the end of the song, they're right there encouraging us to "ride the White Pony", which is slang for cocaine. So there's that. The video features this creepy guy held over from their A-side clip, but none of it makes sense anyway. I guess because I'm not on the "white pony"...

"White Horse" went on to top the American dance club play chart for three weeks, while reaching the pop top-40 in May of 1984. It did even better on the R&B format, going as high as #5. This would their only pop radio success in the US, though they would have a top-10 club record two yeasr later with the double-sided single "One Life / It's The Way You Do It". The duo eventually scored a minor hit in the UK with the track "Bakerman", which also reached the top-10 in Germany in 1989.

It's odd that in the same decade that would give us both Eric Clapton's "Cocaine" and Grandmaster Melle Mel's "White Lines", this record would be the highest-charting song regarding the drug....

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In 1989, the duo re-released a new mix of "White Horse", but it didn't catch on...

"White Horse" has been sampled a whole bunch of times since then, most notably in 1994 by 20 Fingers and Gillette on the record "Short Dick Man" which went to #14 on the pop chart in the US...

...and then R&B singer Monifah used "White Horse" as the backdrop to her Top-10 pop hit "Touch It" in 1998...

Lastly, the production remixing team of Orange Factory had a club hit on the Billboard chart in 2003 with a cover of "White Horse", but somehow it's never made it to YouTube...

Up tomorrow: German metalheads go all meteorological on ya.