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2605. Shania Twain - ‘Don’t Be Stupid (You Know I Love You) (Dance Mix Single)’ (1999)

Don’t freak out until you know the facts Relax Max

from the album Come On Over

I’ve always found it amusing that such lengths were taken to make Shania Twain’s blockbuster album Come On Over more palatable to international audiences (including remixing the entire tracklist), only for the global single version of ‘Don’t Be Stupid (You Know I Love You)’ to come out sounding like ‘Cotton Eye Joe’. It does, however, make a lot of sense, once we consider just how much time had passed between the US single release of ‘Don’t Be Stupid’s original country version (September 1997) and the European/Australian “dance mix” (February 2000), plus the ways in which Shania’s image and audience had completely changed over those two-and-a-half years.

Come On Over was always going to be a major event - in North America, Shania’s previous album The Woman In Me had been a massive breakthrough, spawning eight country hits and selling four million copies in its first year, so expectations were high for the follow-up. When Come On Over was unleashed in November 1997, however, it exceeded all predictions, consistently selling huge amounts and delivering hit after hit after hit (twelve in total, a ridiculous amount, even in the golden age of artist’s milking their albums for years). Not only was Shania now the biggest female artist in the US and Canada, she was getting hits in mainland Europe, where she had never experienced success, the UK, where she had no prior chart record, and Australia, where she had snatched a top five hit in 1996, but was not yet a major star.

As the Come On Over campaign continued, with different single releases and different mixes for each territory, Shania Twain began to become something of a cartoon figure, a country artist who, outside of the US, didn’t seem to actually sing much country - the international versions of ‘You’re Still The One’ and ‘From This Moment On’ were pop ballads, ‘That Don’t Impress Me Much’ was a pumping dance hit, and ‘Man! I Feel Like A Woman!’ had more in common with Tina Turner than Tammy Wynette. More traditional country songs from Come On Over, like ‘Honey, I’m Home’ or the title track, had not seen single release in Europe or Australia, so the remix of ‘Don’t Be Stupid’, which came at the end of the album campaign, may have been a deliberate move to remind those audiences of where Shania Twain came from.

With that said, ‘Don’t Be Stupid’ is still, at its core, a brilliant, joyous novelty, a shameless caricature of country set to a dance beat. Lyrically, the song was always ridiculous, featuring Shania rebuffing her man’s relationship concerns with lines like “why don’t you take a pill and put a little trust in me?”, and, as if the whole thing couldn’t get any more late-nineties, the video features Irish dancers - if you embrace Shania in all her aunt-at-a-wedding glory, the whole package is just bliss. Come On Over became bigger than anyone could have imagined, but right to the end, the album cycle was delivering brazenly goofy moments like ‘Don’t Be Stupid’, and luckily for us, Shania’s music would only get more absurd as time went on.

‘Don’t Be Stupid (You Know I Love You) (Dance Mix Single)’ music video: