Video Of The Week: Men Without Hats

Sure, they can dance if they want to, they can leave their friends behind, 'cause their friends don't dance and if they don't dance, well, they're no friends of mine. And Pop Goes The World.

But as the 1980s were coming to a close, Men Without Hats were vying for something a little harsher in their sound, and they couldn't quite put their fingers on what, exactly, as technology hadn't reached the capabilities they needed: they wanted to move into more electronic territory, somewhere closer to Nine Inch Nails.

And when they realized couldn't, they instead reverted back into straightforward rock, at a time where boy-band pop was all the rage. They decided to swim against the mainstream. And in 1990, they released Sideways, whose title track is this week's Video of The Week. Listen to the riff: that's a full year before Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit, which supposedly ''killed pop'' and ''changed the world of music'' by putting the ''emphasis back on the artists as songwriters''.

Guess what?: to this day, Kurt Cobain is dead, neither of the remaining two band members own the rights to their songs, and Ivan, as the writer and publisher of Safety Dance and the rest of his material, gets paid every time his songs are used anywhere, and considering The Simpsons use them a lot and are in syndication all around the world, he gets pretty much $50 every time he breathes while Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic don't even have the right to release the rest of Nirvana's unreleased songs and get that chapter of their life over with.

I call it ''karma''.