Songoftheday 11/8/21 - New Kids On The block had a bunch of hits, Chinese food makes me sick...

 

 

"Summer Girls" - LFO (Lyte Funkie Ones)

from the album LFO (1999)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #3 (four weeks)

Weeks in the Top-40: 13

 

Today's song comes from the "boy-band" trio LFO, who started out as the Lyte Funkie Ones in Massachussetts city New Bedford in the mid-1990's. Originally with Rich Cronin, Brad Fischetti, and Brian Gillis, the trio sign with the Trans Continental management team (the infamous group under the late felon Lou Pearlman), they initially signed to Logic Records, a big Eurodance label with the likes of La Bouche and Snap! in Europe. Their first single, "(Sex U Up) The Way You Like It", "bubbled under" the pop Hot 100 chart in Billboard magazine in America at #105 in 1997.  A second single, a remake of New Kids On The Block's "Step By Step", was a minor hit in Germany at #79. After a third release, an interpolation of the disco classic "If I Can't Have You" featuring Kayo (a Logic Records artist that appeared on many single from the label), which placed them on the Hot 100 for the first time at #70, while becoming a minor hit in the UK at #54, Gillis left the group, to be replaced by Devin Lima.

 

Renaming themselves LFO for the American market and signing to Arista Records,  the group released their debut album LFO in the summer of 1999, with some of the tracks still with Gillis on them (including "Can't Have You"). Their next single from the set was "Summergirls", a stream of consciousness lite-rap record written by Cronin and produced by Dow Brain and Brad Young. With none of the verses making any correlation with each other besides a half-name-dropping series that precedes Train's "Hey Soul Sister" by decades, the song puts all this over a gentle acoustic guitar groove that just flows enough to be background cruising music of the last summer of the millennium. But as silly as the lyrics are (especially the opening which titles this post), you can't help but remember them years later like the most insidious earworm, but in the end, this is so, so embarrassingly bad, but the trio's hotness factor surely got them a primo spot on MTV with this video filmed at Coney Island...

Nevertheless, "Summer Girls" certainly caught on, becoming the group's first big hit, reaching the top ten on the Hot 100 in August of 1999. Internationally, the single made the top-40 in New Zealand (#14), the UK (#16), Canada (#18), and Sweden (#36). The LFO album, released in August as the song was peaking at radio, went to #21 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, spending a year on the chart and selling over a million copies. Both the group and the album will be back to the series.

(2/10)

(Click below to see the rest of the post)

 

 

Here's the trio appearing on the Roseanne Barr TV show in 1999 (jeez, did everyone have a talk show that year?)...

Next up, in concert in Orlando in 2000...

And lastly, Fischetti and Lima doing an acoustic radio take on this in 2017 (Cronin had died of leukemia in 2010)...

 

Up tomorrow: ExFugee encompasses the totality.