In this summer of 2009, there’s no beating the hits of (It’s a “rebel moon.”) The stars “burn like diamonds.” The chorus delivers the money shot: Gloriana’s daffiness might be too much to take if the song weren’t so damn good. But “Wild at Heart” is a perfect single, a song-length hook, or patchwork of hooks: the “We Will Rock You” drum machine beat, the “Jack and Diane” guitar strum, the “funky breakdown.” The lyrics are also a pastiche-a sequence of clichés so complete that they transcend cliché and approach conceptual art. The song was composed by three pros, Music Row veterans Stephanie Bentley and Josh Kear, and Matchbox Twenty’s producer Matt Serletic, and it seems as if the songwriters grabbed random phrases from old hits, and assembled them, exquisite corpse-style, into verses, choruses, and a bridge. The result is a narrative, of sorts, about young lovers: “a couple kids runnin’ loose and wild” who have “nothing to lose but time.” The moon is shinin’.
In the wised-up world of postmodern pop, Nashville is the last bastion of pure camp. “Wild at Heart” is a bubble-gum pop song of the sort rarely seen these days: unrelentingly perky without a hint of distancing irony. Exhibit A is the video for the group’s debut single, “Wild at Heart,” an eruption of beatific singing, dancing, hand-clapping, and ear-to-ear grinning.
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