I was recently on another early-90’s binge, as I’m apt to do on a semi-weekly basis whenever a song from my high school years happens to pop up on iTunes. In this instance, the song that sparked my fancy was that masterpiece of hip-house, The Power, by Snap. Looking back on these songs, I never realized at the time that the seemingly innocuous dance tunes I enjoyed were filled to the brim with all sorts of wisdom and sage advice. Poison, for instance, warned of the dangers in placing one’s trust in big butts and smiles. Naive child that I was, I accepted the song as cautionary tale about jars with skull-and-crossbone stickers on them that just happened to have the kind of beat that you could do the Running Man to.  Likewise, The Power, warns the listener of the consequences of climbing onto rapper Turbo B’s back - which will most certainly lead to an attack that the listener doesn’t want.

So after breaking out into Running Man fits, I thought back on those muggy summers watching Channel V and remembered “Rhythm is a Dancer” … which, if I remember correctly, involved a pretty lady singing and dancing in circles. I remembered incorrectly. The song I was thinking about was EXTERMINATE!

From “The Power” to “Rhythm …” to “Exterminate”, Snap seemed to have shedded their funky and acceptable-to-America hip-house facade to gradually reveal their terrifying Eurodance identities, like those reptile aliens in V who invade Earth to enslave and eat humans. Like most early-to-mid 90’s techno acts (where are you now, La Bouche and 2Unlimited?) they were banished to the land of One-Hit-Wonderonia and thoroughly forgotten, which I guess left Snap’s German-born producers to follow the steady 4/4 beat of their hearts and make the music that they were born to make … which just happened to sound just like all of the other Eurodance of the time. But what strikes me most about “Exterminate” is the lyrics, and how they don’t make a lick of got damn sense.

You can feel when the music starts to groove

Rhythm of the music and the body starts to move …

EXTERMINATE!

which, if you think about it, isn’t all that different from:

The power of the beat makes me move my hips

It surges to my toes and up through my lips …

GENOCIDE!

It’s fun to imagine skin-tight latex-clad Euro kids, furiously posing like trees to this song at their local discotheques, like so:

… who are then compelled to strangle the nearest person when that twist in the song comes up. Ah, the early 90’s were magical times.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 26th, 2009 at 2:59 pm and is filed under Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.