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  • Big in Europe (Actually Big Everywhere Except Here): Yolanda Be Cool & DCUP “We No Speak Americano”

    Back when I was in high school, there was this British dj collective called Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers who scored a Top 20 hit called “Swing the Mood” by basically taking a bunch of hits from the 40s and 50s – incongruously matching the Glenn Miller Band with the Everly Brothers, among others – and mashing them all together into a single track fit for school dances and wedding receptions. Urgh. For awhile there, “Swing the Mood” was inescapable although thankfully it never reached the achieved the sort of cultural saturation the “Macarena” would half a decade later.

    Now, storming charts all across Europe – around the world, in fact – is the Australian duo Yolanda Be Cool (named for a Tarantino quote) who teamed up with producer DCUP for a single called “We No Speak Americano”, which is essentially a 21st century house music puree of a 1956 performance by Italian pop singer Renato Carosone called “Tu Vuò Fà l’Americano”. In addition to going Top 10 in the duo’s home country and New Zealand, “We No Speak Americano” has so far topped the charts in the UK, Switzerland, Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, Austria, and, yes, Romania. Congressional Republicans may have much of the country convinced that the single greatest threat to the American way of life is creeping socialism. I beg to differ. Creeping socialism has nothing on the creeping ubiquity of this song – little more than a musical gimmick writ large, albeit one with an adorably silly (and expertly executed) “silent movie” video.

    And if you’re curious, here’s some pretty awesome video of Renato Carosone’s original. I could totally party with these guys!

  • The Monday Morning Awesome: The Roots “Here I Come” (2006)

    Looking for a little motivation this Monday morning? Look no further than this terrific live performance by Philadelphia’s The Roots, on the David Letterman show in 2006. The song is “Here I Come”, one of the highlights of their album Game Theory, which is, to my mind, their best.

  • The Friday Night Awesome: G.C. Cameron “Act Like a Shotgun” (1971)

    When contractual obligations strike: G.C. Cameron joined the Spinners just in time to sing the lead on “It’s a Shame”, the esteemed vocal group’s biggest hit of their Motown tenure. Released in 1970, that single (co-written by Stevie Wonder with Cameron in mind) ended a nearly half-decade losing streak for the group on the pop charts and set them up for the greater successes they would achieve in the 70s on the Atlantic label. But when the Spinners split from Motown in 1971, a contractual quirk forced Cameron to stay on at the label, which, at the beginning of its second decade was experiencing some serious growing pains, including the departures of some of the label’s signature talents like the Four Tops and the songwriting-producing team of Holland-Dozier-Holland, who left to form their own Invictus label and were already scoring hits with the Honey Cone and Freda Payne often backed by moonlighting Motown session players. Cameron’s first solo single, released on Motown’s short-lived MoWest label, was this Willie Hutch-penned number which, amazingly, made its CD debut just two years ago on Hip-O Select’s The Complete Motown Singles Vol. 11B: 1971. Hutch went on to score a number of blaxploitation flicks, most notably The Mack. Cameron has recorded intermittently for various labels in the last 40 years (most notably doing the original version of “It’s So Hard to Say Good-bye to Yesterday” for the movie Cooley High, which Boyz II Men would cover to great effect in the early 90s). In the last 10 years, he briefly re-joined The Spinners, and later joined The Temptations.