The Number Fortys: Elton John - "Who Wear These Shoes"

In The Number Fortys, we review whatever song was sitting at #40 on the Billboard charts. We began in the first week of January 1984, right around the time this writer became cognizant/obsessive about music, and will continue until we get bored. The seeds for the idea came from Tom Breihan's Number Ones column over at Stereogum. However, we here at k-postpunk believe that the bottom is more interesting than the top (and obscurity is more interesting than either). Also, if you want to read the Number in the title as meaning "more numb," I think that's totally understandable at this point.

No question mark in the title, but man do I have a lot of questions. Why is there thunder at the beginning of the song? Was anyone fooled by that toupee? Given that Elton can't dance, why not get a ringer to wear the hat and shades? Did anyone notice that the last two minutes of the song are basically an extended meandering chorus? Who thought it was an idea to take the common colloquialism of walking in someone else's shoes and apply it to a break-up and try to make a whole song out of it?

I actually know the answer to the last question--long time Elton lyricist Bernie Taupin, a man with so little poetry in his soul, and so many aspirations to poetry in his writing, that Taupin is the kind of ridiculous that I can't help finding a little endearing. Who Wears These Shoes, however, contains no poetry, no aspirations. It's an extended metaphor stretched so thin, that by the end of the song I'm strongly considering whether the song is actually just about shoes. That Elton, the narrator, whoever, left their shoes behind when they moved out, and they're genuinely curious how the shoes are doing now that this same shoe-sized person is living there. They don't want the shoes back, necessarily, they just hope they're comfortable.

After a late 70s/early 80s commercial/creative lull, the by-product of exhaustion and cocaine addiction, Elton John was having a bit of a comeback around this time. The past year-plus had seen hits like I Guess That's Why They Call It the Blues (it's an 8), I'm Still Standing (it was true, Elton doesn't lay down once during the video; the song's a 6); and Sad Songs (Say So Much). The last one is a 4. And if you've detected a pattern of diminishing returns, you are absolutely right. Elton would have hits through the rest of the 80s--we may or may not encounter them as we travel through the decade--but they are all uniformly horrible.

Who Wears These Shoes thinks it sounds Motown-influenced, and I suppose for the first 30 seconds or so it does an extremely 80s-fied impersonation of You Can't Hurry Love. Then the song starts, and the rhythm guitar gets subsumed by the doobie-doo lead. Goodbye Motown, hello 80's schlock. A melody, catchy or otherwise, refuses to make itself known. The song keeps going anyway. A bridge appears, no more memorable than anything. The song feels like it will go on forever. Eventually it stops, having played out all its (tired, uninspired) ideas long before it ended.

Apparently, this song went all the way to #16. I have no memory of it ever existing. This song has no reason for existing, and yeah, I get that in a cosmological sense none of us have any reason for existing, but I think of the effort that went into writing and recording this, all the people who worked on the video, and it just makes me sad. Everyone involved in this song would have been better off spending that time mediating, or jerking off into a sock.

Score: 1.

THE NUMBER ONE



Tina's third week at number one, which means we've already written about it twice. It's cool that, not only did this song reach #1, it stayed there for a while. It wasn't a fluke hit. It didn't struggle. For nearly a month, this beautiful song of wisdom and pain was the most popular song in the country.

Score: 10.