This weekend’s jam was huge when I was in high school and college, so you best believe I spent lots of time trying to dance/dance up on girls while it played. (“Eww, you like rap?”) I speak of Ginuwine’s “Pony,” from his 1996 debut Ginuwine…the Bachelor. It’s big, stupid, corny American pop; by the time I got to college, it was a grotesquely overplayed single that almost everyone without a heart of stone still loved to hear, kind of like “Satisfaction” or “Beat It.” But the video! I saw this a few times back in the day, but I didn’t remember much until it came across my digital radar yesterday. The video! I like the song at least twice as much now.
To recap, through the power of jeans, dance, song, and a tectonically catchy Timbaland beat (Virginia represent), son turns a roadside honky tonk into a multiracial sex party. A lot is going on here. Historically loaded encounters between older white men and black bar patrons. Ginuwine’s hair. The hat situation. People who aren’t villains are smoking cigarettes!
Enjoy. Pop music that stays pop is a form of high art. I believe some people have said this.
The General Reader 
Although I have many memories of this song, the most vivid is of a New Year’s Eve when I was rawly single and hanging at the Lexington Club, an awesome lesbian bar in San Francisco. I was one of only a handful of straight men in the joint, but I was welcomed by all, and the dance floor was thrumpin’ when this song came on just before midnight. A good time was had by all.