Recasting house music as pure pop-soul, a 1991 club classic that was a hymn to an idealised boyfriend sung by a former Miss Black Arizona. From Pride parades to Fire Island, and Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert to princesses at the Palladium, it ain’t a party without Finally.
For three or four years in the early ’90s, the mainstream airwaves were pulsing with a glossy array of diva-driven Eurodance tracks just as Chic, Donna Summer and Gloria Gaynor had spearheaded some 15 years earlier.
Dishing up these trancey post-disco ditties was a plethora of continental cretins, among them Ace Of Base (Sweden), Culture Beat, Snap! (both Germany), Technotronic (Netherlands) and 2 Unlimited (Belgium).
Occasionally, even artier throughly English subversives the KLF and Pet Shop Boys delved into the crossover and got in on the act, though the less said about Absolutely Fabulous the better.
With the benefit of hindsight, one could call the re-emergence of high energy dance music as absolution for the careers, disproportionally black and gay or female, that were cut short when the homophobic and racist Disco Sucks cancel culture reared its ugly head in 1979.
Then again, few of the above speak as powerfully to that moment of resurgence and retribution as CeCe Peniston’s gut-wrenchingly gratified Finally.
This was different – a club track firmly in the Chicago house tradition, with the Phoenix-raised Peniston not as a disposable rent-a-diva but as a fully realised personality at the centre. The singer was working in a shop and doing support vocals on the side when A&M tapped her for a single. She took the lyrics from a poem she’d scribbled in college and turned them into Finally, her first and best-known hit, a joyously self-fulfilling prophecy enabling her to live out her dreams.
Between the stubby tea dance-ready beat and exclamatory chorus, and the way Peniston belts, growls, and scats her way through it, Finally suggests a triumphant almost religious sense of rapture, swiftly becoming an indelible anthem for finding community, romance, embodiment, desire, self-confidence, or whatever else might have felt unattainable for way too long.
Obviously, she’s singing about the thrill of finally meeting Mr. Right “with brown cocoa skin and curly black hair,” but by the end, when the song’s thrifty threadbare lyrics melt down into a series of syncopated syllables – “nga-nay, uh-nay, ay-yay, aaaow” – this poptastic pleasure principle had clearly taken off into the meta stratosphere. More importantly, as AIDS was wreaking havoc on the gay community, the song’s promise of deliverance telegraphed a message of uplift amid struggle.
First charting the first week of October 1991, the 45 peaked at a middling 29 in the UK. A slow burner par excellence, after its eventual Top 5 placing on the American Billboard chart in January a remix by New York DJ David Morales toughened up the beats for the dancefloor, and made the Brits finally fall in love with Finally. It was only prevented from bagging the No 1 spot by an immovable eight-week chart-topper, the Dave Stewart-produced Stay by Shakespears Sister.
The wait to exhale has never felt so richly earned.
Steve Pafford
BONUS BEATS
Many happy returns Chris Lowe. What’s in a name?
