Songoftheday 6/16/16 - Your shallow acquaintances what's there to choose, you won't get too deep even though I'm worth so much more...

"I Beg Your Pardon" - Kon Kan
from the album Move To Move (1989)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #15 (two weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 9

Today's song of the day comes from the Canadian dance act Kon Kan, whose name is a riff off of that country's national radio rule Canadian Content. That rule required Canadian radio stations to play a certain percentage of local-grown acts. This local grown act came from Toronto, with keyboardist and producer Barry Harris teaming up with singer Kevin Wynne originally for the one-off "mash-up"-style sample-heavy "I Beg Your Pardon". The record was based on the 1970 country-pop smash "Rose Garden" from Lynn Anderson, which went to #3 on the pop chart and #1 country...

Adding a frenetic club beat and stolen samples from other disco records like GQ's "Disco Nights" and Spagna's "Call Me", it was Lynn's bridge-turned-chorus that made this gem stand out, but beneath that is actually quite a lyrically deep track...

"I Beg Your Pardon" became Kon Kan's sole American Top-40 pop hit in March of 1989. The 12" remix single, meanwhile, climbed to #3 on Billboard's Dance Club Play chart. Internationally, the song made the top ten in the Netherlands (#3), Britain (#5), Germany (#8), and New Zealand (#7), and stopped at #19 in their native Canada.

In the U.S., the duo followed it up with another mashup, "Puss N' Boots/These Boots Are Made For Walkin'", which combined the Nancy Sinatra classic with Led Zeppelin's "The Immigrant Song". It stopped at #58 on the pop chart and #25 dance. In Canada, though, they put out "Harry Houdini", which gave them a second top-40 pop hit there at #39. Wynne would be gone before Kon Kan's second album, Syntonic, was released, leaving Harris to use session singers to back himself up; from it a couple of minor Canadian hits came. He did the same with 1993's Vida, which gave him his last minor Canadian hit under the moniker with "Sinful Wishes" (#75). He closed shop on Kon Kan shortly after, but Barry went on to even bigger success as a dance music remixer, with a series of projects topped off by his collaboration with Chris Cox in Thunderpuss, which was one of the biggest club mixing teams of the late 90s/early naughties for Whitney Houston, Madonna, and under their own name, topping the club chart twice with "Papa's Got A Brand New Pigbag" in 2001 and "Head" in 2003. He's also done work under his own name, most notably the "title song" from Queer As Folk, "Dive In The Pool". Last year, his single "What Makes Your Heart Beat Faster" climbed to #10 on the dance chart.

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And here's the club mix that reached the top-3 on the dance chart...

...and lastly, an awesome remix done by the 7th Heaven team...

Up tomorrow: A Neighbourly Aussie is out in the open.