White Horse by Laid Back

Danish duo Laid Back's 1983 proto-techno nugget 'White Horse' is the kind of track that slinks into you as an earworm and stays there as a minimalist manifesto. On the surface, it's a funky electro groove - spare drum machine, skeletal bassline and a vocal delivery so deadpan it borders on parody. But beneath the pulse lies something closer to Dadaist punk: a refusal to play by pop's rules, a celebration of absurd reduction.

Tim Stahl and John Guldberg's lyrics are a warning wrapped in nonsense: 'If you wanna ride/ Don't ride the white horse'. It's anti-drug messaging delivered with ironic detachment, as if the band were mocking the very idea of moral instruction in song. The repetition is hypnotic, the phrasing deliberately flat, turning prohibition into performance art. And like Dada, it thrives on contradiction - serious subject, unserious delivery.

In stripping funk down to its barest bones, Laid Back created a track that's both danceable and laughably austere. And it endures because it refuses to explain itself.