Sade — “By Your Side”

60 Songs That Explain the '90s

This episode of '60 Songs That Explain the '90s' explores the enduring emotional resonance of Sade's 'By Your Side,' celebrating the song's

Key takeaways

Sade's music transcends time, offering a sense of enduring calm and emotional depth that remains relevant across generations.

Main topics

The lasting impact of Sade's music
Emotional resonance in 'By Your Side'

Notable quotes

"That quiet confidence lends itself to making some of the, in Rob's words, horniest music imaginable, and the world is better for it."

Conclusion

Sade's 'By Your Side' stands as a testament to the power of music to offer comfort,

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:07) Hello, friends. A quick note to say that 60 Songs is now available on YouTube. We made it. Success. That was easy. You can now watch full episodes of this show on YouTube, and you can also check out our new social media accounts on Instagram and TikTok, all using the name 60 Songs that explain the 90s. We have heard your cries of despair and confusion, and we have therefore embraced various popular online platforms. So watch us on YouTube. Check us out on TikTok and Instagram. I'm on Blue Sky and Twitter still under the name Harvilla, H-A-R-V-I-L-L-A, but maybe stay out of it. I don't know. We'll put all the links for these in the episode description as well. Thanks for listening and or watching, and we'll see you on the internet. Speaker 4 (0:58) This episode of 60 Songs That Explain the 90s is presented to you by Nintendo. Some things stick around for a reason. A great song, a favorite movie, a game everyone wants another turn at. The Nintendo Switch 2 system fits right into that tradition. With two controllers included in games like Mario Kart World, Donkey Kong Bonanza, and EA Sports FC 26, there's something for every age and every mood. Whether you're at home or on the go, it's easy to keep the good stuff in rotation. Learn more at Nintendo.com slash Nintendo Switch 2. Games and systems sold separately. Games rated E to E10+. Speaker 4 (1:43) People often ask me, they say, Rob, what is your single greatest professional accomplishment? No one has ever asked me that. And what I always say is my greatest professional accomplishment, the highlight of my distinguished journalism career, my enduring legacy is that I was technically present for the birth. of the Let's Remember Some Guys movement. Speaker 4 (2:27) Here we have Walk of Life, the infectiously buoyant top 10 single from the English guitar rock band Dire Straits from their blockbuster 1985 album Brothers in Arms. That's the big whoop Dire Straits album, the one with money or nothing on it. That one. Whereas Walk of Life is a brighter. poppier, circus-keyboard-driven bubblegum jam from Dire Straits with a wildly popular MTV music video that's mostly sports bloopers. Right? NBA stars wiping out, NFL stars biffing routine catches, baseball stars crashing full speed into each other whilst chasing pop flies, etc. Endearingly childish whimsy. Boys playing games poorly. Fantastic music video. I turned seven years old in 1985 and my four favorite things on earth in no particular order were MTV, sports, video games, and bloopers. Three out of four ain't bad. Speaker 7 (3:46) I Speaker 4 (3:47) just spent 20 minutes solid trying to figure out the names of the two NBA players in this one blooper in the Walk of Life video. It's a two-second clip. Maybe. A guy on the Seattle Supersonics. He's got the ball and he fakes a shot. And a guy on the San Antonio Spurs tries to block the shot and he wildly leaps halfway across the court, full extension, and crashes out of bounds and off camera. John Sundvold, point guard for the Seattle Supersonics. He fakes the shot. Alvin Robertson. shooting guard for the San Antonio Spurs. He gets faked out of his shorts and jumps higher and farther than he's ever jumped in his whole life. Shake it off, Alvin. Good hustle. I am 85 % sure. about these names. There's me re-watching the Walk of Life video frame by frame to try and read the blurry name on the back of John Sundvold's jersey. There's me on basketballreference.com looking up everyone who ever wore number 21 for the Spurs, including later Tim Duncan wore 21. It's fascinating. I spent 20 minutes on this activity. This is pointless. This is of the utmost importance. John Sunvold and Alvin Robertson. Remember those guys? That blooper isn't even all that amusing or remarkable within the context of the Walk of Life video. There's a better blooper just a few seconds later where two dudes, two fielders on the San Diego Padres, they collide super violently in the shallow outfield. Ouch. Jeez. Yeah, see, that clip is much more striking and memorable. And I do wonder who Fernando Gonzalez and Oscar Gamble. That looked like it hurt. I hoped Fernando and Oscar are OK. That one, it was way easier to get their names because both their names are faintly visible on their jerseys. I'm pretty good at this. Remember those guys? Speaker 4 (6:04) My favorite part of the song Walk of Life is the backing vocals in the chorus right there. There's another violent baseball player collision at that exact point in the video, but it's two guys on the Yankees, I think, and I don't give a shit. I find that all music from the year 1985, rock, pop, soul, rap, whatever, anything at all from 1985 has this gauzy... backlit idyllic golden hour beer commercial glow to it both in my ears and in my head if that makes any sense. This is partly a matter of both technical pop music production style. 1985, you got hella reverb. You got super 80s gated drums a la In the Air Tonight by Phil Collins. You got gourmet cheeseball synthesizers. Even Bruce Springsteen gets to sounding like a new wave guy. It's the 80s. It objectively, sonically sounds. like the 80s, but it's also a matter of pure, uncut, overpowering nostalgia. The romanticized blurriness of youth, of childhood. Both musically and sentimentally, I can smell 1985 like a fart in a car. Is that from a movie? That's from a movie. Is that a line from a movie from 1985? That'd be awesome. Pump up the volume. Christian Slater said that in Pump Up the Volume, but that's 1990. That's too bad. Close, though. Yeah, my permanent inner seven-year-old has a permanent, innocent, joyful, visceral response. to the A backing vocals on Walk of Life. And weirdly, I get the exact same nostalgic dopamine burst if you just start naming 1985 baseball players in my presence. Julio Franco, Ryan Sandberg, Lou Whitaker, Tony Gwynn, Dale Murphy, Wade Boggs, Kent Hrebek, Kirby Puckett. Remember those guys? Everyone remembers those guys. Those are superstars. A true remember-some-guys experience has to involve guys you might not remember. Not totally obscure players, it's not an insult, but slightly less famous than Tony Gwynn. And yeah, the names of those superstar guys reverberate in my head to this day like tasty gated snare drums, or even like heavily-reverbed super 80s hand claps. Speaker 4 (8:54) John Fogerty, center field, 1985. I could smell the 1985. Even the first 12 seconds of the center field video, you get a different vintage baseball card on screen with every echoing hand clap. Roberto Clemente, Al Kaline, Carl Yastrzemski, Frank Robinson, Duke Snyder. Remember those guys? Of course you do. Those are older but even more famous superstar guys. Centerfield is a bright, poppy, ebullient beer commercial of a song that makes me nostalgic for 1985. But the song itself, or the video itself anyway, is about how John Fogerty is nostalgic for 1955. Speaker 4 (9:41) or so. Centerfield is a 41-year-old song that makes me reminisce unabashedly about a guy who's unabashedly reminiscing about the Eisenhower administration. Speaker 4 (10:05) Whole lot of Yankees action in the center field video. I still don't give a shit. Also, lots of vintage classic black and white baseball action in this video. And yeah, man, I'll tell you what I won't be doing is calculating how old that footage was in 1985 versus how old the center field video is now. I will make no such calculations. Center field. and the center field video especially. This song exemplifies the timeless, universal phenomenon where remembering a famous hit pop song and remembering a famous or even not famous sports guy can light up the exact same pleasure center in your brain. They both open a portal to the idyllic, carefree, distant, unrecoverable past. The name Wade Boggs. Superstar Third Basement, Boston Red Sox. I don't give a shit about the Red Sox either. The sonorous, lilting quality of the name, Wade Boggs, and the gourmet cheeseball keyboard line, they can both trigger an unexpected, instantaneous joy. Both the name and the melody can provide a wistful sort of solace. They can both bring you legitimate comfort. They can both magically transport you back to the, what do you call them? The glory days. Speaker 4 (11:44) Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Glory Days, 1984. See? Bruce Springsteen, new wave guy. Speaking of dopamine hit gourmet cheeseball circus keyboard lines. I forgot that in the Glory Days video, Bruce spends part of the time just watching baseball on TV alone. While drinking beer and looking vaguely pensive and dissatisfied with the arc of his life, it's a powerful image. The boss himself bathed in a melancholy TV glow as he's just throwing back a few and perhaps remembering some guys. Oh, right. Yeah, so in 2015, I'm working for the sports blog Deadspin. I'm the culture editor at Deadspin. I'm writing about music and movies and stuff. for a sports blog, sports and pop culture, on one website, unprecedented. And one day, Friday, May 15th, 2015, on that fateful day, one of my dear colleagues, the superstar blogger and editor Tom Ley, Tom writes a very short, goofy, throwaway deadspin post. that unexpectedly starts a revolution. I didn't have anything to do with this, and I wasn't even physically in the office with him. I was just on staff, working remotely and on the internet when this occurred. This is my single greatest professional accomplishment, my vague proximity to this event. The headline is, Let's Remember Some Guys. And this post, in the time-honored manner of many mid-2010s sports blog posts, it's inspired by a tweet. That same day, the NFL podcast Around the NFL has a tweet that just goes, Colts running back Vic Ballard, colon, quote, it feels like a lot of people just forgot about me, end quote. There's a typo in the tweet, but that only makes it more authentic. And so this blog post, Tom just embeds that tweet and he says, quote, damn, Vic Ballard is right. I totally forgot about him. I've forgotten about a lot of guys, and I bet you have too. Frown emoji. Let's remember some of them. End quote. And then Tom just lists a bunch of guys. NFL guys in honor of temporarily forgotten Colts running back Vic Ballard. They might all be running backs, but I don't have time to check. And that's the whole blog post. Tom just reels off the names of 18 guys with zero context. Speaker 4 (14:26) Do you mind, actually, if I put on some smooth 1985 type shit and remember these guys real quick? Thank you. Sam Khan Gatto, Olandis Gary, Ryan Grant, Ontario Smith, Mike Anderson, Nick Goings, Steve Slate, Lamont Jordan, Corel Buckhalter, Nafahu Tahy, Tatum Bell, Willie Parker, Marion Barber. Najay Davenport Anthony Thomas Kevin Barlow Dominic Williams Ruben Drones Speaker 4 (15:17) Okay, how'd that go for you? It's unexpectedly super pleasant, right? It's legitimately comforting, right? And I say that even though, and don't tell anyone I said this, I find the act of remembering some guys hugely comforting, even if I personally only remembered six of those guys just now, six out of 18. I forgot 66 % of those guys. I won't say exactly which six guys I remember. Out of respect for the 12 guys, I don't, but like I remember Najee Davenport. Okay. In the comment section on Tom Lay's Let's Remember Some Guys blog post explodes. Suddenly you got hundreds of blog commenter guys remembering hundreds of NFL guys. Everybody on the internet just naming. Guys, the original Deadspin post is still up, but the comment section got nuked long ago. It's too long a story, even by my standards. And so now Let's Remember Some Guys becomes a minor cottage industry. Just arbitrary lists of guys with no additional commentary. A reliable source of content for Deadspin and other sports and maybe culture websites of its ilk. Here we have Let's Remember Some Guys, the video version. Speaker 2 (16:38) Do you remember New York Yankee Dan Pasqua? Yes. Dan Pasqua, another New Jersey legend. When I was a kid, there was somebody that was pretending to be Dan Pasqua in North Jersey to get free meals at Italian restaurants. And he got in trouble for it. It was fantastic. Specifically Italian restaurants? Yeah, because I think he would go in there and he'd be like, I don't want to make a big deal of it, but I'm Dan Pasqua. And they'd Speaker 4 (17:00) be Speaker 2 (17:00) like, Dan Pasqua! Okay, Speaker 4 (17:02) there's some commentary. Here's a Deadspin video from 2018 called Remembering Some Guys, colon, 1988 Baseball Guys, starring then-Deadspin staffers David Roth and Lauren Tyson. They just open packs of old baseball cards and remember the guys. I like half-remember Dan Pasqua. I'm giving myself half a point for Dan Pasqua. I had no idea about the Dan Pasqua Italian restaurant imposter. So there's an inside baseball media subtext here in that 2018. It's still the era where major blogs are under huge corporate pressure to do more video stuff, to pivot to video. Video content was a bygone fleeting whim of the industry. Certainly nobody's under any pressure to try video stuff now. Speaker 4 (17:54) But in 2018, Deadspin responds to this broad and temporary do more video imperative by doing the dumbest, most pointless, least visually compelling videos they can think of. Nowadays, Tom and David and Lauren are all blogging and remembering guys on the wonderful website Defector.com. But even in this context. Remembering some guys. It's one of those things that starts out as an ironic joke, but then it turns out that people sincerely love doing it for real. I wonder why that is, really. The question of why remembering some guy's holds such immense, invigorating cosmic power is explored, in fact, in the single greatest three-tweet thread in Twitter history. I don't want to be the guy who's just reciting tweets word for word on a video podcast all the time. I want better for myself. And also for you. But, like, this is important. Speaker 4 (18:55) Okay, so 2021. Somebody with the Twitter display name EM Hudson says, quote, dudes can literally just sit around and name old sports players and just have the best time. End quote. This tweet goes mega viral. 198,000 likes, 2,800 plus replies. And somebody with a Twitter display named Kyle Boggs. Kyle Boggs replies and says, quote, Decades of gender slash sexuality research tell us that this is a dude thing because some men still don't have social permission to create direct bonds with other men. Those bonds have to be indirect through sports talk, women, etc., which is one of many ways. heteropatriarchy hurts men too, end quote. That's what Kyle Boggs says. And then somebody with the Twitter display name Crash Override replies to Kyle Boggs and says, quote, Any relation to Wade Boggs? And I just about died. I am a mere spectator, an awestruck observer of the let's remember some guy's phenomenon. I am, myself, an unremarkable, total amateur guy-rememberer. You know what I remember? Bands. Super famous bands, semi-famous bands, semi-obscure bands, super obscure bands. Dead Eye Dick, that's a band. Remember them? Remembering some bands is not quite the same activity as remembering some guys. Slightly different vibes, slightly different core audience, I suppose. But there is a strikingly similar spiritual effect. Sports and pop culture do go together, and the wildest experience of all is when you remember a sports guy and remember a music person simultaneously at any point in your life. For any reason or for no reason at all, an oft-remembered sports guy and an oft-remembered pop singer can become inexplicably permanently intertwined in your head, to the benefit of both those people, and to your eternal benefit as well. Let me give you an example. In the late 80s, I read an article in Sports Illustrated about what major league baseball relief pitchers do to amuse themselves in the bullpen during rain delays. That's the premise of the article. Some human interest for you. Some boyish whimsy. Also, I cannot find this article online. And so I'm doing this entirely from memory. And that memory may be partly or entirely wrong. What do relief pitchers do in the bullpen to entertain themselves and others during lengthy rain delays? This article describes various benign semi-childish antics, juggling mid-thunderstorm foot races, slip and slide action on the tarps in the infield, etc. But the specific image from this article that has stuck in my head for nearly 40 years now, I'm like 10 years old when I read this, it says in Sports Illustrated that Dan Quisenberry Fan favorite Kansas City Royals reliever Dan Quisenberry, a guy perhaps too famous to need to be remembered. It says in Sports Illustrated that during rain delays, Dan Quisenberry has been known to dance in the rain to Sade's Smooth Operator. Speaker 6 (22:38) No need to ask, he's a smooth operator. Speaker 4 (22:52) Smooth Operator. The breakthrough 1984 single by the phenomenal jazz pop soul London band Sade. A band led by the phenomenal Nigerian-born singer Sade Adu. Sade the singer leads Sade the band. If you're ever dancing or lip syncing to Smooth Operator, or better yet, if you're ever doing karaoke to Smooth Operator, I advise you to hit that no need to ask as hard as you can. Just before the chorus, pump your fist or do double finger guns or do a quick karate kick if you are able. And don't forget the English accent on ask. I advise you to somehow comically overemphasize the no need to ask. Huge crowd pleaser. Trust me, Dan Quisenberry, five-time American League saves leader and 1985 World Series champion. with the Kansas City Royals. Dan Quisenberry with his famous bizarre submarine-style delivery, his pitching hand just inches from the ground on release. How many Little League pitchers in the 80s physically fell off the pitcher's mound trying to imitate Dan Quisenberry's pitching motion? I cannot guarantee you that I personally didn't do that while trying to do that. Dan Quisenberry. whose nickname was simply Quiz, and who sported a majestic, voluminous, great American hero mustache that looks the way drinking a cold six-pack of Budweiser feels. Dan Quisenberry likes to dance to Sade's Smooth Operator. And sitting there at 10 years old, reading Sports Illustrated, I took the liberty. of committing that fact, scare quotes, to memory. And I will never hear Dan Quisenberry's name without thinking about Sade's voice. And I will never hear Sade's voice again without thinking about him. Speaker 4 (25:14) Coast to coast, L.A. to Chicago. If that line were sung by any other singer in pop music history, it would annoy the hell out of me. That's not, no, but Sade sang that line, and so I love it. I hear Sade sing that line, and there it is. I can feel it, a soul-deep serenity, a warm blanket, a glittering portal, a childlike regression back to the mid-80s. I hear Sade's voice, and I am a kid again. I'm a kid who loves MTV sports, video games, and bloopers. And also there's Dan Quisenberry. Now, it is possible, it is in fact likely, that I am wrong about some part of this. I'm like 80 % sure this article is in Sports Illustrated, and I'm like 40 % sure it was Dan Quisenberry dancing to Smooth Operator. The Sade fan might have been some other relief pitcher. A less rememberable... relief pitcher but it does sound like something dan quiz and barry would do i found this short video tribute to him on youtube and it's clear that our buddy quiz is a real cut up although quite Speaker 1 (26:22) serious when opposing american league hitters quiz has been known for his unusual antics in the bullpen and off the field Speaker 4 (26:30) If you're not watching this, I need to tell you that at this point in the video, Dan Quisenberry playfully tosses his baseball glove over his shoulder and he picks up a water hose. Not a fire hose. Not that large a hose, but bigger than a garden hose. Dan picks up a hose and he playfully sprays it around at, you know, waist height. He's a colorful guy. I cannot explain this to you as a 10-year-old. The image. of Dan Quisenberry twirling around in a rain-misted bullpen to the sultry strains of Sade's smooth operator, his mustache glistening in the foggy stadium lights. This image just lodged itself in my head, and the older I get, the more that image stands in for my whole childhood and for