The 1990s File Feature
Do Anything
Natural Selection and the Rise of "Do Anything" to Number Two The summer and autumn of 1991 belonged, in significant measure, to Natural Selection, the Minne…
01 The Story
Natural Selection and the Rise of "Do Anything" to Number Two
The summer and autumn of 1991 belonged, in significant measure, to Natural Selection, the Minneapolis-based duo whose pop-funk single "Do Anything" climbed the Billboard Hot 100 over twenty-one weeks to peak at number 2 during the week of October 19, 1991. The record debuted at number 58 on August 10, 1991, and its sustained upward trajectory through a competitive pop landscape represented one of the more impressive chart climbs of that year. That it stalled at number 2 rather than reaching the summit is itself a notable detail in the record's history.
Natural Selection consisted of Nic Treseler and Elliot Erickson, two musicians whose partnership produced a sound that was deliberately positioned in the mainstream pop-funk space that had proven commercially fertile throughout the late 1980s and was being reshaped in the early 1990s by the New Jack Swing movement. The duo's approach combined elements of funk-inflected rhythm and the melodic accessibility of pop, creating a record that could appeal to both adult contemporary and urban radio formats.
Minneapolis had an established reputation as a center of funk-influenced pop by 1991, largely through the enormous commercial and artistic influence of Prince and the constellation of artists who had worked within and around his Paisley Park operation. While Natural Selection's music was not directly derived from Prince's aesthetic, the city's association with sophisticated, commercially minded funk-pop gave the duo a regional context that was itself meaningful in terms of what audiences might expect from a Minneapolis act.
The chart trajectory of "Do Anything" was one of sustained momentum. After debuting at 58, it moved to 47 in week two, 40 in week three, 34 in week four, 28 in week five, and continued climbing through the following weeks, reaching the top five and eventually settling at number 2. Twenty-one weeks on the chart represented extended commercial durability, well beyond the typical run for a novelty or one-off single. The record demonstrated genuine staying power, building its audience over months rather than peaking quickly and fading.
The competitive context at the top of the chart in October 1991 was formidable. Bryan Adams's "(Everything I Do) I Do It for You," the theme from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, had mounted an extraordinary chart run in the summer of 1991, spending seven weeks at number one before other records began displacing it. The pop landscape in the late summer and early autumn was also absorbing the early commercial activity of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," which debuted on the Hot 100 in September. The slot at number 2, while falling short of the top position, placed "Do Anything" in genuinely elite commercial company.
The production sensibility on "Do Anything" reflected the era's mainstream pop conventions while incorporating enough rhythmic sophistication to give it credibility with audiences attuned to the funk-influenced sounds that were increasingly dominant in commercial R&B. The record's sound was polished and radio-ready, with production choices designed to maximize compatibility with the format requirements of pop radio programming. This commercial calculation served the duo well, as the record's twenty-one-week chart run demonstrated.
Natural Selection's commercial moment was concentrated in this single release. The duo did not achieve sustained chart success across multiple albums, making "Do Anything" one of the more notable one-time commercial peaks in early-1990s pop. The fact that a debut act from Minneapolis could reach number 2 on the Hot 100 with a carefully crafted pop-funk record in the autumn of 1991 speaks to both the quality of the record and the particular commercial openness of that moment in pop radio.
The twenty-one-week chart run ending with a peak of 2 documented something genuine: an audience that found in "Do Anything" exactly the combination of rhythmic energy and melodic warmth they were seeking, and found it consistently enough to sustain the record's commercial activity across nearly half a year on the national chart. That is not a trivial achievement, and "Do Anything" deserves its place among the more successful pop-funk records of the early 1990s.
02 Song Meaning
Permission and Desire in Natural Selection's "Do Anything"
"Do Anything" by Natural Selection operates within one of popular music's most durable romantic frameworks: the declaration that for the right person, the singer would be willing to transcend normal limits, to go beyond the expected, to offer something unlimited as a demonstration of the depth of feeling involved. The title phrase functions as both an offer and an invitation, collapsing the distinction between what the singer would do for the beloved and what the singer wants the beloved to do with that love.
Nic Treseler and Elliot Erickson crafted the song's lyrical and melodic content in a tradition of romantic pop that prizes expansive gesture over specific narrative detail. The appeal of "do anything" as a romantic declaration lies precisely in its refusal of limitation: it does not itemize or specify but opens itself entirely to the other person's needs and desires. That openness is simultaneously generous and vulnerable, which gives the declaration its emotional weight.
The pop-funk production context is essential to understanding how the song's meaning lands. Natural Selection embedded the romantic declaration within a groove-oriented sonic environment that added a physical dimension to the emotional content. In funk-influenced music, the body and its pleasures are never entirely separate from whatever emotional or romantic narrative the lyric presents. The rhythm section creates a context in which "do anything" carries bodily as well as emotional implications, and the interplay between those two registers is part of what made the record commercially compelling across twenty-one weeks on the Hot 100.
The song's perspective is straightforwardly first-person and addressed directly to a specific beloved, which gives it an intimate quality that contrasts productively with the expansiveness of the central declaration. The singer is not making a general philosophical statement about love but speaking to a particular person about a particular feeling. That specificity grounds the unlimited offer in genuine emotional reality rather than abstract sentiment.
In the context of 1991 pop, the song's emotional directness was a commercial asset. The early 1990s produced a substantial body of relationship-oriented pop that dealt with romantic vulnerability and the desire for connection, and "Do Anything" fit comfortably within that emotional landscape. The record did not attempt irony or complexity but delivered its emotional content with sincerity and melodic warmth, which was precisely what its audience sought.
The Minneapolis background of the duo gave the record a particular cultural inflection, even if that context was not explicit in the music. A city associated with sophisticated, emotionally direct pop-funk had produced performers comfortable with combining rhythmic drive and genuine romantic feeling without treating these as contradictory. The groove supported the sentiment rather than undermining it, which is itself a meaningful artistic achievement in a genre where cynicism can sometimes masquerade as sophistication.
The record's sustained chart presence, climbing from a debut of 58 all the way to a peak of number 2 over twenty-one weeks, confirmed that the meaning "Do Anything" offered its listeners was something they returned to repeatedly rather than exhausting quickly. Songs about unlimited devotion and romantic openness, delivered with sufficient melodic and rhythmic appeal, have the capacity to remain emotionally relevant across extended periods because the feeling they describe does not age or resolve. The desire to offer everything to someone you love is perennial, and Natural Selection found a way to make that perennial feeling feel fresh and immediate in the summer and autumn of 1991.
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