Need You Tonight

A deceptively simple 80s hit gets weirder and weirder the more you scrutinize it

In middle school, I could not get enough of “Need You Tonight” by INXS, and it still sounds as fresh today as it did back then.

Music videos are a terrible way to learn about how music works. Why is the drummer air-drumming along with the beat from a drum machine? Also, not really the point, but Michael Hutchence’s otherworldly sexiness is undercut a little bit by the presence of his pet rat.

Anyway, I didn’t yet know the word “cyberpunk” in 1987, but I was definitely hearing this song as cyberpunk. In retrospect, it was a combination of the then-unfamiliar sound of the drum machine, the skittering chorused-out guitar parts, and the line “twenty-first century’s yesterday.” Writing this a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century, the phrase doesn’t have the same romance, but we still had hope for the future back in the 80s.