Songoftheday 6/23/2016 - It was a night like this forty million years ago, I lit a cigarette picked up a monkey skull to go...

"Walk The Dinosaur" - Was (Not Was)
from the album What Up, Dog? (1988)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #7 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 9

Today's song of the day comes from the alternative band Was (Not Was), who were fronted by a pair of producer/musicians (going with the ruse of brothers Don and David Was) along with a bevy of studio musicians and soul singers "Sweet Pea" Atkinson and Harry Bowens. They lurked in the underground until their dance-soul nugget "Spy In The House Of Love" scored them a top-20 hit in the U.S. in the winter of 1988. The follow-up track was the novelty bounce of "Walk The Dinosaur", David and Don claimed it was about the end of the world, but in my young mind I always thought it was a double entendre about doing the personal nasty...

"Walk The Dinosaur" became the group's biggest hit, reaching the American pop top-10 in April of 1989. It also climbed to #30 on Billboard's Modern Rock radio chart, while the 12" remix made it to #11 on their Dance Club Play list. Internationally, the song reached the top-10 in Canada (#6), Australia (#9), Norway (#6), the Netherlands (#10), Switzerland (#9), and the UK (#10).

A third single from What Up, Dog?, the smoother "Anything Can Happen", peaked at #36 on the Adult Contemporary chart, #19 on the club chart, and #75 on the Hot 100. The act released a new album, Are You Okay? in 1990, but though the cover of "Papa Was a Rolling Stone" became a British hit at #12, and rolled in at #10 on the American dance chart, it only was a minor R&B hit at #60 and missed the Hot 100 pop list altogether. A second single, "How The Heart Behaves", was their last Stateside appearance at #35 on the dance list. In 1992, a re-released remix of their early track "Shake Your Head", with vocals from Ozzy Osbourne and Kim Basinger and production by Steve "Silk" Hurley, climbed to #4 on the British singles chart. They record and tour sporadically since.

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Here's the band performing the song live...

In 1993, funk master George Clinton covered "Walk The Dinosaur" for the Super Mario Brothers movie...

Queen Latifah did the same in 2009 for Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs...

...and lastly, the awesome "New York Dangerous" mix of the song...

Up tomorrow: A teen singer inc. has a lot of sense.