The ’90s Were a Golden Age of Novelty Pop Hits. We Did Not Appreciate How Good We Had It

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The single greatest performance of Performative One-Hit-Wonder Hatred I have ever witnessed in person transpired in December 1998 in Cleveland, Ohio, at a bizarre alt-rock-radio-station music festival and canned-food drive co-headlined by Gainesville, Florida, ska-punk lifers Less Than Jake and glorious L.A. one-hit-wonders the New Radicals. Someone should write a whole-ass book on Less Than Jake, and I can’t guarantee you it won’t be me: These dudes were into ska-punk both way before it was cool and (even more impressively) long after, and they have my enduring respect. Less Than Jake fans love Less Than Jake. Also, anecdotally, Less Than Jake fans hate the New Radicals.

“You Get What You Give.” That’s the New Radicals’ one hit. I feel less rude than usual, stating this plainly, because it sure seems like the New Radicals planned on having just the one. They are led by singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, charming Only Guy on the Album Cover narcissist, and bucket-hat enthusiast Gregg Alexander, who I would’ve sworn to you was English (it’s the hat), but who apparently grew up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. Sure. Gregg was raised a Jehovah’s Witness, used to drive around with his mom listening to Motown, and vowed, after hearing Prince’s “The Beautiful Ones” as a teenager, to run away to California and become a rock star (reasonable). And then, briefly, he became one.

I suspect you do not require a lengthy, obnoxious description of “You Get What You Give,” an upbeat piano jam with a phenomenal pre-chorus that sounds like peak Billy Joel discovering cocaine and Jesus simultaneously. (At least that description wasn’t lengthy.) So in Cleveland, at this bizarre canned-food-drive situation, the New Radicals take the stage second-to-last, with only Less Than Jake left to go, and among the more cynical among us, already there’s a sense that “You Get What You Give” is gonna be it for these fellas, hit-wise, very much by design. But in this moment, Gregg and his pals are still very much Going For It in terms of chasing pop stardom, Going For It here defined as willing to play a canned-food drive in Cleveland a week before Christmas. Gregg does not, in my estimation, seem happy to be here, in Cleveland, a week before Christmas. The New Radicals play some songs, to broad crowd indifference. Halfway through the set, they play “You Get What You Give.” The crowd perks up. The New Radicals proceed to play other, far less popular New Radicals songs; the crowd once again grows indifferent. The set ends, blessedly. No encore is requested, and yet the band returns for an encore anyway. The encore consists of “You Get What You Give,” again.

And suddenly Cleveland, in my estimation, doesn’t seem too happy that the New Radicals are still here. “Somebody find a power outlet!” someone yells. And then I watch in amazement as a sizable group of Less Than Jake fans, huddled together in the middle of the crowd, stand silently, with their middle fingers raised toward the stage, for the entirety of “You Get What You Give,” again. Not a great time to be surrounded by canned food.

This image—a bird-flipping flock of peeved Less Than Jake fans—pops into my head whenever I revisit the New Radicals’ debut (and farewell) album, 1998’s Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too, which has, just in case you weren’t aware, other songs, most notably an impressively goopy ballad called “Someday We’ll Know” during which Gregg bellows, “DID THE CAPTAIN OF THE TITANIC CRY?,” which I am rendering here in all caps because that’s how he sings it. The whole album is as chaotic and pompous and ideologically convoluted as subversive major-label pop gets, a sunny hellscape of dystopian post-Motown cocaine melodramas; sometimes, by design, Gregg sounds like an incoherently mumbling hot mess, and sometimes he sounds like a focused L.A. studio pro with a surprisingly affecting falsetto who’s just totally Going For It. Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life” bears mentioning here, I suppose, in terms of maximum dorky pop as a delivery system for maximum drug-binge shock value; I also suspect that Gregg and 3EB frontman Stephan Jenkins would really get along, and that you don’t want to be around when they do.

And then the band flamed out, and Gregg worked behind the scenes on some blockbuster pop songs you’ve probably heard (including the 2002 Santana and Michelle Branch jam “The Game of Love”) but otherwise stayed out of sight until, quite unexpectedly, Joe Biden’s 2021 virtual inauguration spectacular, wherein Gregg and his pals reunited to play “You Get What You Give” again. The song meant a great deal to Joe as his son, Beau Biden, battled brain cancer: The lines “This whole world/Can break your heart/Don’t be afraid/Follow your heart” especially. Beau died in 2015. Even the silliest, most flamboyant pop flukes are unimaginably important to somebody.

It was great to see Gregg’s face again. And if any of those pissed-off Less Than Jake fans were watching, I hope they gave him a second chance, and gave his song a third.

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Is the New Radicals vs. Less Than Jake the weirdest show I’ve ever seen? Is it the most ’90s show I’ve ever seen? What’s the single most ’90s sentence I could write? Let’s try this: In college I saw both Big Bad Voodoo Daddy and the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies live. Separate shows. Separate cities. Tight window of opportunity. The mid-to-late-’90s swing revival gets my vote as the decade’s most surreal and transcendently disreputable subgenre, ennobled by the horn-heavy emergence of third-wave ska and turbocharged by Jon Favreau’s canonical 1996 comedy Swingers, which climaxes with Big Bad Voodoo Daddy—stylish Southern California gents who’d already been at it since 1989—helping our boy Jon get the girl, the girl in this case being Heather Graham. Impressive! Cut to Cleveland in 1998, and BBVD are commanding a stylish and exuberant crowd eager, for some reason, to wild out to a song called “Go Daddy O” and exuberantly time-warp themselves back to the Great Depression. It made perfect sense at the time.

As for the disreputably named Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, they hailed from Eugene, Oregon, which makes as much sense as anyplace else would; front man Steve Perry had the sort of booming voice and vivid lyrical flair (“pull a comb through your coal-black hair”) that allowed you to overlook, for the length of a peppy hit 1997 song called “Zoot Suit Riot,” the fact that the actual Zoot Suit Riots were racist attacks on Latino teenagers in World War II-era Los Angeles. I told you this was weird.

Did neo-swing make perfect sense at the time? It probably didn’t. Did I enjoy the occasional tune from the Squirrel Nut Zippers or the Brian Setzer Orchestra anyway? Hell yes I did. Does “Zoot Suit Riot” hold up now as a double-nostalgic pop song? Hell yes it does. Just now, did I make it all the way through a second Cherry Poppin’ Daddies track? Hell no I didn’t, but only because I picked a song called “Here Comes the Snake” before deciding I didn’t want any part of the Snake. Was this music escapist, in the classic pop-music sense? I guess, but don’t ask me to explain why sexy young people in 1997 sought to escape to the halcyon days of, like, 1927 or 1937. I can’t decide if this stuff is timeless in the classic pop-music sense, or if the whole appeal is that it’s proudly, explicitly dated. Either works, but either way it’s way more fun if you do the goddamn dance, even if the goddamn dance is like 20 times harder to do than the Macarena.

You want to talk truly timeless? Did you know Cher was born in 1946, which was the year after World War II ended? I don’t say that to be rude, but to more effectively convey my awe that Cher, at 52, had a massive pop hit the year after “Zoot Suit Riot” came out with 1998’s “Believe,” an AutoTune exaltation that divided the 1990s from the 2000s just as surely as God divided the light from the darkness.

“Some years I’m the coolest thing that ever happened,” she told Rolling Stone in 1999, shortly after “Believe” became her fourth No. 1 Billboard single and her first since 1974. “And then the next year everyone’s so over me.” As a snotty alt-rockin’ early-’90s teenager I knew her primarily as the infomercial lady who slapped Nicolas Cage and called David Letterman an asshole and wore That One Outfit on That One Battleship. The notion of Cher as a present-tense hitmaker struck me—seemingly struck everyone—as ridiculous, and yet “Believe,” in its dance-pop effervescence and invigorating post-heartbreak bravado and wine-dark-sea depth of defiantly human vocal tone, is the one song from the 20th century that defines the 21st century for me, a brassy voice from the distant past who graciously stopped selling moisturizing shampoo on television long enough to point us toward our transcendent android future.

AutoTune, as the 2000s rumbled onward, was dismissed as a cheat, a crutch, an abomination, an anti-art and anti-human scourge publicly reviled by everyone from Steve Albini to Christina Aguilera to Jay-Z. But there’s Cher, of all people, in 1998 of all years, stretching the word sad into four electrifyingly melodramatic syllables—It’s so sa-a-a-ad that you’re leavin’—that breathe life back into the ghost in the machine. She perfected this polarizing technology years before its loudest and pissiest detractors had even heard of it; Cher, 25 years ago now, is still the only Artificial Intelligence I ever want to hear about. I caught her alleged Farewell Tour in 2002 at a hockey arena in Columbus, Ohio, and whatever I wrote about her is mercifully lost to the pre-Peak Internet mists of time, but I’m guessing it was just oh and wow alternating for 600 words. And my descendants will revere her as well, centuries hence, delighted to welcome their robot overlords so long as they speak with her voice.

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Performatively hate them while you can, by the way, because the very concept of the one-hit wonder is dying. They’ve done studies; they’ve compiled data. (The website Priceonomics raised a ruckus with a 2015 post literally titled “The Death of the One-Hit Wonder,” bolstered by a graph of artists who only ever had one song chart in the Billboard Hot 100, showing a steady downward curve from 1965 to 2015. Cher was back on tour by then, FYI.) The biggest songs spend more time overall in the Hot 100 now—months as opposed to weeks—so there’s less room for newer shit, plus Taylor Swift, for example, can put out a new Taylor Swift record, and suddenly the whole Top 10 is new Taylor Swift songs. It’s like how Film People complain that Marvel movies are clogging up all the movie theaters.

The consequence for pop music is that you get fewer delightfully arbitrary thunderbolts like Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ “Come on Eileen” (No. 1 in 1983) or a-ha’s “Take on Me” (No. 1 in 1985) or Cutting Crew’s “(I Just) Died in Your Arms” (No. 1 in 1987, love the parentheses). And precisely because the artists in question did not endure as pop stars in the years to come (sorry), those hit songs come to define, and also perhaps explain, the years and indeed the whole decade in which they were briefly hit songs and those artists were briefly pop stars. This phrase one-hit wonder, despite being hella rude, is itself growing archaic, and we will miss it when it’s gone, and miss the one-hit wonders when they’re gone.

You’ll miss the Chumbawambas when they’re gone. Chumbawamba: British anarchist collective. Put out their debut album in 1986 and called it Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records just to puncture the pompousness of Live Aid. Put out six more records (including one in 1994 called Anarchy), all of which righteous and energetic and pugnacious, none of which mainstream in any traditional sense of the term. And then, in 1997, out of approximately fucking nowhere, they hit No. 6 in America with “Tubthumping,” an exuberant Molotov cocktail of pub battle cries, trumpet solos, whiskey drinks, vodka drinks, lager drinks, cider drinks, and dulcet odes to “pissing the night away.”

Did “Tubthumping”—with its less dulcet but very necessary refrain of ”I GET KNOCKED DOWN / BUT I GET UP AGAIN,” very much bellowed in all caps—inspire a generation of alt-rockin’ American teens to embrace true utopian pro-union and anti-fascist anarchy? Not really. Was the song instead co-opted as a dreaded Jock Jam, a genre animated by the sort of vacuous apolitical boorishness antithetical to much of what Chumbawamba stood for? Kinda. Still a great song though, right? Fuck yeah.

That sense of hard-fought exuberance—irrational, fleeting, tempered by the subversion-proof mainstream, and yet mercifully undimmed by the merciless passage of time—is what we can’t afford to lose, no matter how silly that exuberance often sounds and feels. You’ll miss the Tag Teams when they’re gone. Tag Team: Atlanta pop-rap duo of DC the Brain Supreme and Steve Rolln. Hit No. 2 in 1993 with a bumptious and mostly family-friendly Miami Bass hybrid called ”Whoomp! (There It Is).” Prevailed, chart-wise, in a gritted-teeth feud with 95 South, a Miami Bass crew way closer to Miami (Jacksonville) who had a remarkably similar (but notably less popular) hit song at the same time called “Whoot, There It Is.” Snuck a song with the line “I crave skin”—a remarkably gnarly way to convey the sentiment that DC the Brain Supreme is conveying there, i.e., he’s horny—into a song that’ll charmingly corrupt every family reunion you attend for the rest of your life.

“Whoomp! (There It Is)” has no political ideology beyond an unflagging allegiance to the “B-double-O-T-Y oh my,” and yet it conjures up a remarkably Chumbawambian sense of rapturous anarchy. As for Tag Team’s 1993 debut album, also called Whoomp! (There It Is), I can report that it has, just in case you weren’t aware, other songs, including one in which DC the Brain Supreme announces, “Nubian ham is what I want,” which is an even gnarlier way to convey the sentiment that he’s horny. But this story ends the only way it could: with no further Tag Team hits, with Steve Rolln arrested in 1997 while in possession of 600 pounds of Mexican marijuana (he got out of prison in 2001), and the fellas triumphantly reunited in 2021 for a viral Geico ad in which they chant, “Scoop! There it is!” while making ice-cream sundaes in some lady’s kitchen.

You’ll miss absurd shit like this. You’ll miss the Mark Morrisons when they’re gone. Mark Morrison: the “Return of the Mack” guy. Born in 1974 in Germany to parents who emigrated to the U.K. from Barbados and mostly raised him in Leicester, England. Grew up rough and learned to sing R&B with the deftness, the lasciviousness, the rhythmic and melodic swagger of a G-funk superstar rapper, albeit with a remarkably nasal voice that can make the word freaky sound extra freaky. Says he wrote “Return of the Mack” in the Leicester prison on Welford Road. Recorded the allegedly slow, staid, toothless original version of “Return of the Mack” that very few people have heard and that apparently no one liked; handed the song over to Joe Belmaati and Cutfather, two Danish producers who cranked the tempo, added the drums from the immortal 1981 Tom Tom Club smash “Genius of Love,” added bright new chords from a 1992 R&B tune called “Games” from an L.A. singer named Chuckii Booker, tossed in a bunch of other li’l samples from the likes of Run-DMC and the French disco giant Cerrone, and wound up with the 1996 version of “Return of the Mack” that pretty much everyone has heard and absolutely everyone thinks is the best song ever made while they’re listening to it.

It’s the way Mark sings the words, “Oh my god,” with that ultra-nasal ultra-swagger. There is a sweetness, a tartness to his voice that is inextricable from his nasal-ness, to his huh-I-didn’t-know-he-was-Englishness, to his bad-boy-ness. And he’s a pop star now, and he puts out a 1996 album also called Return of the Mack, which has, just in case you weren’t aware, other songs, including the one where he chants freaky freaky freaky a whole lot, and I dig the softcore nasal braggadocio of this record quite a lot, actually, but the Mack will only be returning for a limited time. In 1994, Mark was involved in a nightclub brawl that ended with a man named Julian Leong stabbed to death; four years later, in a newspaper article in the Scottish Daily Record, it says, “The singer punched Mr. Leong in the face and smashed a bottle. He told police he did it to calm the situation.” The trick, I think, is to avoid situations where it becomes necessary to smash a bottle and punch someone in the face just to calm the situation.

Mark was not the guy with the knife in that brawl, and he gets arrested but is ultimately sentenced to community service, which he then blows off by sending a bodyguard to do it for him, and this scheme fails, obviously, and only nets Mark more prison time, according to another Scottish Daily Record article that describes Mark as both a yob and a sod. Both those terms are insults, so far as I can tell, and while I can’t tell you exactly what a yob or a sod is or what differentiates the two, I do know that you want to try to avoid doing anything that might compel a Scottish newspaper to call you a yob and a sod in the same article. My point here is that “Return of the Mack” is Mark Morrison’s only American hit. You’ll miss shit like this the most.

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What is the single greatest opening line of the 1990s? Let’s figure this out. To expedite the process of figuring this out, let’s narrow the field down to two choices. Your choices are “Alright stop, collaborate and listen” or “Man, it’s a hot one.” You pick. “Man, it’s a hot one” is not from a one-hit wonder, just in case you weren’t aware. Santana, the eponymous rock band led by Mexican-born guitar god Carlos Santana, racked up two Top 10 hits, “Evil Ways” and “Black Magic Woman,” back in, huh, look at that, 1970. Wow. Santana played fuckin’ Woodstock. Not Limp Bizkit and Brian Setzer Orchestra and societal-collapse Woodstock. The original, legit 1969 Woodstock. This is the guy whose shrewdly eponymous rock band finally landed a No. 1 hit in, huh, look at that, 1999. Wow. That song is “Smooth,” and Rob Thomas, professional Stephan Jenkins antagonist and frontman for ascendant Orlando pop-rockers Matchbox 20, is on lead vocals, and Rob’s legit-genius first line is “Man, it’s a hot one,” as you might be aware.

What’s the deal with “Man, it’s a hot one”? What elevates this blithe, half-muttered, temperature-based remark to the pantheon? Could part of the attraction be doubt? “When I listened to the lyrics and heard, ‘It’s a hot one,’ those lyrics are outside of time and gravity,” Carlos himself observed to Rolling Stone in 2019. “I thought we had entered a place of immortality. But with all respect to Rob, I said, ‘I’m having a little challenge believing you that what you’re singing is true.’”

Wow. Is it really a hot one, Rob? And who exactly are you to say? Don’t mansplain the weather to me, Rob. Let’s not discount the role of gentle derision here, and irony, and sarcasm. Your sarcasm, though, not the singer’s. Rob Thomas sings the line “Man, it’s a hot one” like he’s hot. He sounds sweaty. Grant him that. And anyway pop-song immortality often starts as somewhat of a joke. Ha ha ha, “Man, it’s a hot one.” That’s so dumb. I’ll never forget it as long as I live.

But to my mind, the true greatness of “Smooth” lies in the whiplash pivot from the nonchalant generality of “Man it’s a hot one” to the remarkable specificity of “My muñequita / My Spanish Harlem Mona Lisa.” Incredible. Muñequita means “little doll”; Rob wrote this song for his girlfriend, Marisol Maldonado, who is of Spanish and Puerto Rican descent and grew up in Queens (close enough). They got married in 1999, and they’re still married, and she stars in the “Smooth” video—it’s really all terribly sweet. “When I met Carlos,” Rob told Leila Cobo for her book, “the first thing he said was, ‘Hey, you must be married to a Latin woman; that’s the kind of thing a white guy married to a Latin woman would say.’”

Fantastic. “Smooth” was the last No. 1 song of the 20th century and the first No. 1 song of the 21st century; it topped the charts for 12 weeks, total, but it felt like two whole centuries. This song somehow sounds, today, like it’s still the No. 1 song in America, today. Supernatural generated another No. 1 hit (“Maria Maria”!), sold approximately 10 billion copies, won approximately 200 Grammys, and made fifty-something Carlos Santana a present-tense pop hitmaker; probably all of that happens even if “Smooth” doesn’t begin the way it begins, but what I know for certain is that when Rob half-mutters That Line, that’s the precise moment when this song moves outside of time and gravity.

That’s your first option. Your second option arrives courtesy of Robert Van Winkle, the Dallas-born white-rapper dynamo better known to the world as Vanilla Ice, who in 1990 enraptured us with just five words: “Alright stop, collaborate and listen.” He says, “Alright stop,” and you stop. He says, “Collaborate,” and you go, What? He says, “And listen,” and you listen.

So, listen. Cards on the table. In 1990, as a dimwit 13-year-old, I owned six cassette tapes. You ready for this shit? Six tapes. Hysteria by Def Leppard, New Jersey by Bon Jovi, Gonna Make You Sweat by C+C Music Factory, Pump Up the Jam by Technotronic, Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ’Em by MC Hammer, and To the Extreme by Vanilla Ice. And what I know for a fact is that Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” is the platonic ideal of your first rap song, or at least the first rap song you ever loved. It’s a better song the less hip-hop you’re familiar with, the less context you have in general, the younger and more naïve you are. It’s the best rap song imaginable if you are but an adorable newborn foal, your shaky legs tottering adorably on the Disneyfied ice of late childhood or early pre-adolescence. It’s better if you don’t know shit about shit.

“Ice Ice Baby” is a way better song, for example, if you’re unaware that it samples the absolute bejesus out of the 1981 Queen and David Bowie arena-rock masterpiece “Under Pressure”; it’s a better song if you’ve never seen that exquisitely mortifying MTV clip of Vanilla Ice attempting to explain that “Ice Ice Baby” doesn’t sample “Under Pressure.” It’s better if you’re unaware that the lines, “Police on the scene / You know what I mean / They pass me up / Confronted all the dope fiends,” is the purest expression of white privilege in the history of American song. It’s better if you’re unaware that Vanilla Ice is gonna get roasted to a crisp by Arsenio Hall on The Arsenio Hall Show, and Kevin Bacon on Saturday Night Live, and (even worse) by Jim Carrey on In Living Color. It’s better if you’re unaware that Vanilla Ice was born in Dallas, not Miami as he often implied, and that his real name is indeed Robert Van Winkle, not literally anything else.

It’s better (last one, promise) if you didn’t catch Vanilla Ice at the 1991 American Music Awards, concluding his acceptance speech for Best Pop/Rock Artist with an ill-advised message for the haters: “Word to your mother. And the people who try to hold me down and talk bad about me, kiss my white butt. Word to your mother.” It’s better (this is the last one, honest) if you just stop the song, and your personal development, and Vanilla Ice’s whole career after “Alright stop / Collaborate and listen.” So let’s do that, actually. Let’s do what he says, but do what he says in reverse. Listen. Then collaborate. (Huh?) Then stop.

Originally Appeared on GQ