This was from the album Mosaic. It reached number 2 in the US but only made it to number 76 in the UK. A fun dance song. In 1986 everybody knew this song. They may not have liked it, they may have hated it, they may have loved it, but they all knew it. It had a seizure-causing spazmatic video to go with it.
For the most part the message and lyrics seemed pretty simple. Everybody have fun tonight. Is that what this song really meant? Wasn’t there some deeper meaning? Oh and by the way, what the heck does ‘everybody Wang Chung tonight” mean? Using your bands name as a verb…really? Well yes, the song is simply about having good clean fun.
So why did Jack Hues and Nick Feldman decide to also tell everone to Wang Chung tonight? Feldman said “Wang Chung is the feeling, not the word. It represents an abstract, an escape from pragmatic, complex ideas. Wang Chung means whatever you want it to mean. Have fun with it. That’s the whole idea of the line ‘Everybody Wang Chung Tonight.’ It can mean a tribal dance, a Viennese waltz, a party in New York, or whatever.” Hmmm, sounds like a good answer. This song was originally written as a much slower, ballad type song. In the original slower version “Wang Chung” was only mentioned once. That version never got recorded. Producer Peter Wolf encouraged a much faster, fun song.
He also suggested repeating the ‘Wang Chung’ part many times, if for nothing else than band promotion. Hues agreed, he later said “In retrospect it was probably one of the better commercial decisions we ever made.” The catch phrase ‘everybody Wang Chung tonight’ was cool for a while and still turns up today here and there. What do you think? You can comment below.