The achy breaky, which has just as rapidly swept the country bars of America, was invented by choreographer Melanie Greenwood as a marketing tool for Billy Ray Cyrus, a newcomer with a song called “Achy Breaky Heart.” Cyrus’s record company then put the tool to work. They produced an instructional video, aimed at dance teachers, and began promoting achy-breaky dance classes and contests at country bars. It clicked. Along with the very catchy country-rock ditty, the dance and the marketing campaign have pushed Cyrus, a hunky unknown from Flatwoods, Ky., to the top of the pop-album charts. He knocked off Kris Kross. Said Caryn Paperny, winner of an achy-breaky contest in Long Beach, Calif., last week (she’ll go on to compete at the Orange County Fair in July), “It’s got a great beat for dancing, and I never get sick of it.”
Cyrus, whose Mel Gibson looks and post-Michael Bolton hair make him a natural for country’s newly dawning video era, spent most of the prevideo age trying to get his calls returned. It’s easy to see why. His album, “Some Gave All,” is– apart from the single-undistinguished at best, flat at the worst. If not for the hit, it would be dismissable.
But underneath all the marketing, the videos and the substantial hunk factor, “Achy Breaky Heart” is an infectious, frivolous pop single-a hit any way you slice it. Aimed at the new country audience, which was raised on rock, the song owes as much to Bob Seger or the Rolling Stones of " Tumbling Dice" as it does to Bill Monroe. The achy breaky, a complicated line dance, most resembles the disco classic the bus stop. But by now, the song is driving the dance more than the other way around. As our ancestors used to say, it’s got a good beat, and you can dance to it. With the right corporate push, that works every time.
