Songoftheday 12/3/21 - I like Angela, Pamela, Sandra and Rita, and as I continue you know they getting sweeter...
"Mambo No. 5 (A Little Bit Of...)" - Lou Bega
from the album A Little Bit Of Mambo (1999)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #3 (two weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 20
Today's song comes from Lou Bega, a singer with Italian and Ugandan parents who grew up mostly in Germany. After moving to Miami as a teen, Bega began a music career as a rapper at first, before going back to Germany, where he eventually signed with the Ariola division of RCA Records. His debut single was "Mambo No. 5 (A Little Bit Of...)", a track that interpolates the background melody of the song of the same name by Cuban bandleader Perez Prado. That track, released in 1950, came at the tail end of the "swing" genre as a prominent form of pop music. Prado's estate ended up suing for plagiarism, and the resulting court case awarded Prado a co-write credit (and compensation) on the song....
While that melody is familiar, it was Bega and producer Christian Pietschacher that came up with all the lyrics as well as the flow of the record. Turning the mambo into a novelty hit listing all the women Lou has presumably been with (in the most vague of ways), it was a silly but memorable one-off that was lucky in its timing to ride both the waves of neo-swing and the Latin Explosion at the same time, never mind that Lou is German and the song was associated with swing like the I Love Lucy theme would be. It's easy to forget that this is basically a rap song, with Lou droning the verses decades before Drake made bank doing it, and in the middle it somehow goes from being a list of women to a dance instructional song that I don't remember anybody doing...
"Mambo No. 5" became Bega's first and biggest and only top-40 pop hit in America in November of 1999. The song spent a half a year on Billboard magazine's older-skewing Adult Top-40 radio chart, with three of those at #2, while also making it to #26 on the Adult Contempoary (or "easy listening") format list. But internationally, this song was massive, spending twenty consecutive weeks at #1 in France, and 11 weeks in his German homeland, as well and topping the charts in the UK, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Denmark, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, and Italy. Bega's debut album, A Little Bit Of Mambo, was released in July of that year, and went to #3 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, going on to sell over three million copies (it helped that the CD single was a limited supply, forcing people to get the album).
Bega's follow-up single, "I Got A Girl", tried to continue the "let's rattle off women's names" hook and turning it into a geography lesson. While it was a moderate hit worldwide, going top ten in France (#5), Belgium (#9), and Finland (#2), it stalled down at #55 in the UK and was entirely passed over in the States. Instead, the U.S. turned "Tricky Tricky" into a minor hit, and Lou's final Hot 100 appearance at #74. In France, where Bega had his biggest success with "Mambo No 5", the single "Mambo Mambo" nearly made the top ten at #11. To be honest, his album is more entertaining than a "one hit wonder" set has a right to be.
Lou returned in 2001 with his sophomore effort Ladies and Gentlemen, which sold modestly in the German-speaking part of Europe, with "Gentleman" reaching the top-40 in Austria (#16) and Germany (#35). However, that wasn't enough to keep him on RCA/BMG, and Lou went indie for an album in 2005, Lounatic, which had its single "Bachata" (which really is prescient in the pop world at the time) spend a solitary week at #100 on the German singles chart. A second indie album, Free Again, scored Bega his last top-40 hit in Germany so far with "Sweet Like Cola" (#38). Since then, Lou has released a pair of covers album of 80's and 90's hits, with 90's Cruiser being released this past August, which got to #91 on the German album sales chart, with the single "Bongo Bong".
(7/10)
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Here's Lou performing "Mambo No 5" on British TV in 1999...
and yes, here's Bega with an entire orchestra with violinist and bandleader Andre Rieu to a packed house in the Netherlands in 2018...
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