When I was in college, I had a roommate who was totally into the 90s dance/R&B stuff. You know the music of which I speak - songs like CeCe Peniston's "Finally," Black Box's "Strike It Up," La Bouche's "Be My Lover" and Snap!'s "Rhythm Is A Dancer." There are countless others and at the time, they all sounded about the same to me, but that hardly mattered when you were out and pleasantly buzzed by cheap beer. And even though it's getting to be 20 years on (!), they still sound pretty much the same. But it still doesn't matter. Whenever I get 90s nostalgic, trashy 90s Eurodance is usually what I reach for first.My favorite of all these songs is a song that I spent the last 5 years of the 90s trying to track down. I remember my other roommate singing along with it in the car, and the only things I remembered from it were the lyrics "Why waste your time/You know you're gonna be mine," a rap breakdown that started "Yo DJ pump this party!" and a vampish part that went "da da dat da doo da da/da da dat da doo da da da." I recall searching AltaVista like crazy for this song, trying to identify it. When Napster hit, I tried every permutation of "Yo DJ pump this party!" and "Why waste your time" that I could muster to completely no avail.
Then one day, I got extremely lucky and stumbled across it while searching 90s dance music compilations on Amazon. By then, Napster was defunct, but Audiogalaxy wasn't, so I went and got the song. I remember bragging to my sister about how I had found this song I had been looking for so long. Turns out, she knew it all along and all I would have had to have done was ask her and all the hair-pulling could have been avoided, even though a part of me enjoyed the thrill of the chase.
The song in question? Bizarre Inc.'s "I'm Gonna Get You."
The version of the song I got from Audiogalaxy was not the version I remembered, so about a year ago tonight (I went through my massive Gmail archive to find out for sure), I put out a call to some friends of mine to see if anyone had a better version of the song. As one of those guys said, this is why it pays to have gay friends. Not only did he have a better version of the song, he had THE version of the song I remembered. It was 1993 all over again.
Over the last few weeks, I've been vetting songs for the latest installment of the CD I make with Matt and Bess - the theme for this one is guilty pleasures. "I'm Gonna Get You" didn't quite make the cut as I'm not really embarrassed by it. But it sure does take me back.
(thanks to XO and Robbie whose Twitter conversation has inspired this fit of 90s nostalgia)
1 comment:
As soon as I saw the title of this entry I heard that guy saying "Yo DJ, pump this party!" in my head. :) I was in high school and college during these years, so I am incredibly familiar with all of these songs.
My favorite of the R&B/dance stuff was This Is How We Do It by Montell Jordan. Love that song. Although, I did just buy Now That We Found Love by Heavy D and the Boyz this weekend... Ah, 90s nostalgia. :)
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