Alban Uzoma Nwapa was born and raised in Southeastern Nigeria and came to Sweden at the age of 23 to study dentistry. To help with the costs he took up a job as a DJ at a local Stockholm club where he often sang along to the tunes and soon became well-known, so he kept doing it as a lucrative side-job after finishing his studies and opening his own practice.
Fast-forward to 1992, when his second album “One Love” was released under the stage name Dr. Alban. It contained two Euro-dance songs, which became very popular all over Europe: the Gospel “Sing Hallelujah!” and “It’s My Life”, which was further popularised by featuring in the background of a Tampax commercial.
There are few videos with such distinguished dances that a whole World of Warcraft race will forever be following suit (well, half a race, as the dances are gender-specific). Los Del Río’s “Macarena” was one such, or Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies”. The single most recognisable dance-move, however, clearly goes the male orc. Or, well, to “M.C. Hammer” and his unforgettable “U Can’t Touch This”.
Released in 1990 the song features a sample of “Super Freak” by Rick Jones. And it looks as if history is repeating itself somewhat with me trying to educate the younger generation of VSHNeers here, as many of Hammer’s young listeners at the time were too young to know Jones’ song even though it was only 9 years old. The sample is used so prominently that a law suit ensued, ending with Jones being cited as a co-author and earning millions of dollars in royalties.
Even though Hammer lost some credibility in the rap community for incorporating too many pop and dance music elements he would have been set for life with the success of the song – had he not burned through seventy million dollars over the span of five years…
Michael “Flea” Balzary and Anthony Kiedis formed their band “Tony Flow and the Miraculously Majestic Masters of Mayhem” in 1983 when they were classmates at Fairfax High School. It would undergo a fair number of changes before becoming the group that is known these days as the “Red Hot Chilli Peppers”: to the name and personnel, but also to their musical style (with Maceo Parker and Fred Wesley playing on their second album) and quite noteably their lifestyles.
After their early modest success they had all been using heroin, but while most of the members somehow held together, the addiction took quite a toll on Kiedis. The band was already auditioning for a new singer when he managed to overcome the problem in rehab and rejoined them with new enthusiasm. As is often the case, he came down with bouts of depression, and when he drove home from a rehearsal session a few years later a poem came unto him, reminiscing about how he had been under the bridge he was just driving over a few years back, looking for drugs, and how he never wanted to get back to that low point in his life.
When producer Rick Rubin found the poem in Kiedis’ notebook he immediately saw potential, but the singer was reluctant. However, once he was persuaded to at least show it to his bandmates they immediately went to their respective instruments and started working on the song.
It kicked their career into high gear, out of the somewhat obscure Alternative Rock scene into mainstream. And when the video, directed by none other than Gus Van Sant entered heavy rotation on MTV they definitely had arrived in the olymp of pop music.
I remember a day in what must have been about 2000 or 2001 in a gloomy Bonnie Prince Pub, when my fellow drinking mates and I – all students at ETH proud of their good taste in music – finally admitted (after sampling copious amounts of the liquid on tap) that despite their catering to the masses, secretly we did like the Spice Girls. We did not change the station when Christina Aguilera came on. We adored Britney Spears.
When she’s making headlines these days, it sadly tends to be because of her long and difficult struggle with conservatorship, and not for being “The Princess of Pop”. Having started her career in early childhood – winning gymnastic competitions and talent shows alike – her first breakthrough happened in 1992 when she was cast as a member of the rekindled “Mickey Mouse Club” alongside Aguilera, Justin Timberlake, and Ryan Gosling. After the show was canceled it took a few years before she returned to the big stage, but boy, did she have an impact, when she finally did so with “…Baby One More Time” in 1998, still at the tender age of sixteen.
The song was named by Rolling Stone Magazine as “the greatest debut single of all time” as recently as 2020. The video has been voted the best of the entire 1990s and one of the most influential in the history of pop music. And a whole generation of young men had their hormones thoroughly shaken up. But unlike other videos where young women cater to the sexist ideals of men the video was Britney’s own product from A to Z. The dancing? Her idea. The wardrobe? Her choice. The knotted T-Shirt? Her final touch. The music… well, that’s another topic (the song had been offered to both “The Backstreet Boys” and “TLC” before, but they were not interested).
And the “love interest”? Was her cousin Chad.
Her career had only just started. She would produce a row of other really big hits over the years, but they would become less and less successful in time. It’s hard to have an even bigger hit when you start at that level.
Two weeks ago we learned about a high point of Swedish music videos. This week we’re having a look at the other end of that scale.
We do not even need to go into Hegelian dialectic to realise that sometimes when you mix two things a beautiful new synthesis may result. Unfortunately, the opposite is true as well: take the worst of two musical genres and you might just end up with a frightening chimera. I honestly tried my best to do proper research and put some kind of spin on it. But you know what? It’s simply utter trash. And that’s all it is.
Highly successful trash, to be fair though. It held number one for over 13 weeks in Switzerland’s hit-parade, for example. So if nothing else this internal education gives an answer to whether really “everything was better in the olden times”, at least when these olden times happen to be just about 30 years ago. Hell, no, it wasn’t.
When R.E.M. (who were supposedly named by pointing randomly into a dictionary and not after “Rapid Eye Movement”, and who up until then had a persistent but smallish fan base on college radio stations) released their single for “Losing My Religion” it became a huge international success with heavy rotations both on radio stations all over the world as well as on MTV. The accompanying video was nominated for a whopping nine video awards of the year and went on to win six of them, including “Video of the Year”.
All of which is of course impressive, but does not explain to me why they couldn’t just use the loo. Misheard lyrics can do that to you.
Here we are now, in containers. Hold me closer, Tony Danza.
Do you remember our second episode, with the morphing technology and famous actors? That short movie had cost $4’000’000 to produce. Today’s video, in quite a contrast, came in at $800…
Norman Quention Cook had played in a number of more or less successful bands such as The Housemartins or Freak Power (to whom we most definitely will dedicate a future episode) by the time he adopted the name “Fatboy Slim” in 1996 and went on to popularise the “big beat” genre. When the video to “Rockafeller Skank” was released, director Spike Jonze – who had been unable to work on it – sent Slim his own dance version, which the latter found to be so much better that he commissioned the music video for “Praise You” from Jonze’s fictional “Torrance Community Dance Group”.
And so the video was shot by Jonze and Roman Coppola without permission and in front of unsuspecting spectators (except for one: Cook himself can be spotted among the onlookers), who just so happened to be at the Fox Bruin Theatre in Los Angeles the night when it all went down. A flash mob – four years before the term was officially coined – who would go on to win the Music Video Award for “Best Choreography”. Including a grumpy theatre employee, who turned off the cassette player – which is why the video version of the song is quite different from the album one in that particular respect.
When the first single from Lenny Kravitz’ third studio album “Are You Gonna Go My Way” was released – the song bearing the same name – critics were holding back with neither superlatives nor comparisons to one of, if not the greatest guitarist there ever was: Jimi Hendrix.
The accompanying video – shot by Mark Romanek who certainly directed his fair share of famous music videos – features Kravitz in a modern version of an amphitheatre, complete with sophisticated lighting rigging and a crowd going properly wild for what is probably the most eclectic of his songs.
144 times. That’s the number of repetitions the one and only sentence in Daft Punks’ “Around the World” gets. Does that make the song Gross? On the contrary!
The video is resembling the structure of the song quite closely: There are five instruments, and therefore five groups of characters. Robots for voice (apparently powered by the program you wrote back then for that “introduction to algorithms” class, by the looks of their collision reactions 😋), athletes for the bass, disco dancers for the keyboard, skeletons for the guitar (in a divergence to their traditional role in Saint-Saëns’ “Le Carnaval des Animaux”) and last, but not least: mummies for the drums.
A meticulously planned mathematical companion to a catchy tune? Count me in!
