Songoftheday 9/18/21 - I've got somethin' to tell ya I've got news for you, gonna put some wheels in motion get ready 'cause we're comin' through...
"We Like To Party!" - Vengaboys
from the albums Up & Down - The Party Album (Benelux, 1998) and The Party Album (US & International, 1999)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #26 (two weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 9
Today's song comes from the Dutch dance act Vengaboys, which was put together by producers Dennis "Danski" van den Driesschen and Wessel "Delmundo" van Diepen in the late 1990s. Despite the name, they featured two women, Kim Sasabone and Denise Post-Van Rijswijk, along with Robin Pors and Roy den Burger. The group, which at first only had the producers and Brazilian-born Sasabone, released their debut single "Parada De Tettas" ("Tit Stop", if Google Translate is correct), which solidified the silliness of the group from the get go, and went to #29 in the Netherlands in 1997. Continuing the Latin appropriation, their follow-up was "To Brazil", which scored a second top-40 Dutch hit at #23.
With their third release, the Danski, Delmundo, and Sasabone went in another direction, tossing the Latin dance schtick for an electronic European take on synth-rave. Bringing on Post-Van Rijswijk, Pors, and den Burger, the new "foursome" put out "Up & Down", which had simulated workout orders matched with a highly inappropriate Japanese voice that sounded very Aqua-esque in the end. The single not only went to #5 in their native Holland in 1998, but became an international success, reaching the top ten in England (#4) and Ireland (#3), and in the United States, topping Billboard magazine's Dance Club Play chart for a week in 1999. This prompted not only an international release for their next single, but also an American release for the album and single. Their debut was reworked and released under the name The Party Album! in the spring of 1999, but before that, their next song "We Like To Party!", subtitled "The Vengabus", was released earlier that year. Written and produced by Danski and Delmundo, the song in itself isn't much more than a wall of bleeps and bloops like in "Up & Down" over an almost march-like beat. It seems like only the women are singing this, but all four show up on the music video, as they seems to take their titular vehicle across Spain to get people to dance. It's fun, it's totally inane, and it's a total earworm if there ever was one, and really nothing like it has hit the American top-40 before or since...
"We Like To Party!" became the Vengaboys' first and only top-40 pop hit in America in April of 1999. The song also rose to #5 on Billboard's Dance Club Play chart. Internationally, the single topped the chart in Belgium, and reached the top ten in their native Netherlands (#2), Australia (#2), the UK (#3), Ireland (#3), Hungary (#3), Germany (#4), Switzerland (#4), Italy (#6), Austria (#6), New Zealand (#9), and Canada (#10). The Party Album!, released in April of 1999, rose to #86 on the Billboard 200 sales tally (a respectable rank for a dance album), going on to sell over half a million copies.
The Vengaboys' next single, "Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!", which continued on the electro-dance vein while cribbing ABBA's "Lay Your Love On Me" in the process, became an even bigger international hit, going all the way to #1 in the UK as well as in the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Sweden, and New Zealand, while in the U.S. it stopped at #84 on the pop Hot 100 and #13 on the Dance Club Play list, although it was much more prevalent in my tri-state neck of the woods than that ranking would indicate. The sixth release from the group took them back to their Latin-flavored roots with the vacation anthem "We're Going To Ibiza", name-checking the popular summertime Spanish island in the Mediterranean. The mid-tempo track topped the charts in the UK and the Netherlands, and made the top ten in places like Germany and Spain, but the eurocentric nature of the song kept it from being noticed in the West.
In the time between albums, Pors left the Vengaboys to be replaced by Yorrick Bakker for their sophomore effort The Platinum Album, which was released in 2000. Lead single "Kiss (When The Sun Don't Shine)", which possibly predicted the current K-pop craze, landed at #1 in New Zealand, and top ten in the Netherlands (#2), the UK (#3), Spain (#5), and Germany (#10), but the best it did in America was a placing at #49 on the Dance Singles Sales chart by their remaining fanbase here. That was followed by two more singles that made the British top ten with "Shalala Lala" (#5 in the UK, also a #1 in New Zealand), and "Uncle John From Jamaica" (#6). They had a couple more moderate hits from the album, with "Forever As One" their final top-40 British hit at #28 in 2001. That song is clearly meant to be a "swan song", a bombastic ballad (without a matching voice) featuring just Sasabone singing with an orchestra.
After a long break, the Vengaboys returned in 2010 with Pors back in the lineup but den Burger replaced by Donny Latupeirissa for a one-off single "Rocket To Uranus", which got them back into the top ten in their home country at #7. Three years later, another stand-alone release, a cover of "Hot! Hot! Hot!" (you'd know it from Buster Poindexter), gave them their last Dutch top-40 hit at #29, though they did have a minor hit there at #48 in 2014 with an update to their "To Brazil". Since then they've released a holiday record and toured, especially in the LGBT circuit and opening for twee-pop titans Steps. Most recently, they've been campaigning to represent the UK at the Eurovision Song Contest, despite their inherit Dutch-ness and, well, music. Gotta hand it to them for trying, though, since it seems like a big nostalgia push for them is happening this year. They just released a new single, "1999 (I Wanna Go Back)". And these days, "We Like To Party!" is probably more remembered as being the tag music for the Six Flags Amusement Park franchise than anything else.
(5/10)
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And lastly in concert at the Festival De Vina in Chile in 2001...
Up tomorrow: R&B singer is loving blindly.
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