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Huey Lewis on the News’s Most Humorous and Strategic Music
“We were always told that we weren’t edgy enough. I’m just not an edgy guy, I guess.”
Lewis always used his pop instincts to metamorphose music of the past with his band, the News, and give it a modern edge, which resulted in a prolific streak of hits throughout the ’80s.Some say his tunes are so catchy, so hip, that they can ax businessmen to death to them. It told the story of a young man torn between a corporate future at a cardboard-box company and band life on the road, a narrative that has helped Lewis — who lost his hearing several years ago and is unable to perform due to Ménière’s disease — recontextualize many of his songs. “Hip to Be Square.” I originally wrote it in the third person: “He used to be a renegade, he used to fool around, couldn’t take the punishment, had to settle down.” It was meant to articulate a phenomenon also written about by David Brooks in Bobos in Paradise: about hippies dropping back in the 1980s.
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