Show-prep, as it was referred to at my undergraduate station, was research the DJ did before arriving for the three-hour shift and consisted of items that he or she could use to sound more interesting or knowledgeable during their stop sets. A lot of people were not the best at thinking off the top of their head and so we encouraged them to find something in the campus or local newspaper – or that fledging online vehicle called the Internet – to give them some sort of edge. We weren't asking for the DJ to talk twenty minutes on a subject - more like twenty seconds, a little chit-chat in between songs as opposed to the stodgy and bland, "I just played these songs, I will play these songs next, it's 8:20 and now here is a recorded public service announcement" type of breaks students tended to blanch their way through.
There was little celebration when the White Town song Your Woman showed up on a weekly preview disc one Tuesday afternoon. Nobody had heard of the group up to this point and the song probably snuck into our playlists because of our desire to add at least one track from each preview disc. No sooner did it waft over the transmitter did we realize that this was going to be one of those grandiose one-hit wonders. Why? Easy: not only did it come out of nowhere in the early months of 1997 but we never ever saw another track by White Town show up at the station. That is, another "new" track - at some point, the original track was supplemented by the less-interesting but not-as-annoying-sounding remix that appeared on a preview disc a month of so later. Oh, hooray: a remix.
It wasn't until years later I discovered that, besides fulfilling its destiny as a one-hit wonder as many on staff prognosticated, but White Town was a one-man band operation led by technophile Jyoti Mishra, a native of India living in England during the late 1990s. Also of interest is that the opening synthesized trumpet sounds are actually samples from the trumpet intro to the song My Woman by the popular British singer Al Bowlly. These tidbits would have been good candidates for any DJ in terms of show-prep. Don't I sound informative and like I know what I'm talking about...?
Boy, I'm finding out all these interesting facts about this song a decade later, when they are of no use to me. Also of no use to me is the fact Mishra released a follow-up album in 2000 and has been recording various singles since his late-90s chart debut.
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Your Woman
(Jyoti Mishra)
White Town
From the album Women in Technology
1997
Just tell me what you've got to say to me
I've been waiting for so long to hear the truth
It comes as no surprise at all you see
So cut the crap and tell me that we're through
Now I know your heart, I know your mind
You don't even know you're bein' unkind
So much for all your highbrow Marxist ways
Just use me up and then you walk away
Boy, you can't play me that way
Well I guess what you say is true
I could never be the right kind of girl for you
CHORUS:
I could never be your woman
I could never be your woman
I could never be your woman
I could never be your woman
When I saw my best friend yesterday
She said she never liked you from the start
Well me, I wish that I could claim the same
But you always knew you held my heart
And you're such a charming, handsome man
Now I think I finally understand
Is it in your genes? I don't know
But I'll soon find out, that's for sure
Why did you play me this way
Well I guess what you say is true
I could never be the right kind of girl for you
(CHORUS)
Well I guess what they say is true
I could never spend my life with a man like you
(CHORUS)
