TRACK #252:
Addams Family (Whoomp!) by Tag Team
We’re gonna keep the Golden Raspberry theme goin here for a sec with a song I’ve actively avoided adding to the playlist since 2013, when we had a whole block of Addams Family tunes.
Much like Hammer’s Too Legit with A Little Bit of Peppa (For My Chicken), Miami-Bass duo Tag Team repackage their preexisting hit Whoomp! (There It Is) for the 1993 sequel Addams Family Values.
Despite the general consensus that this song is a complete pile of auditory bullshit, I rather like Addams Family (Whoomp!), as can be cross referenced on Shindig Radio Ep. 4: Monster Raps Pt. 2.
I think the verses are clever, well spit and highly referential. It even refers to itself as the movie’s theme song. That’s a solid play for a song of this nature. And quite frankly, it should have come loaded with a full-on fucking spoiler alert, cause it details the entire plot of this film. It’s a movie theme to the max.
And I get it, maybe it seems lazy just taking your own song and moving some words around and calling it a day. But honestly, its just a sound maneuver to keep the money train on the tracks from a pair of “alleged” rip-off artists who didn’t have a hell of a lot going on outside of Whoomp!
Yeah, you read that right. I referred to them rip-off artists, come at me. Since no one actually seems to have Tag Team’s back except me, I shouldn’t experience any sort of backlash from such a bold assertion. However, I will indulge a small detour here to clarify my statement for those unfamiliar with the sordid backstory concerning Tag Team‘s original #2 peaking hit, Whoomp (There It Is.)
The year was 1993. The month? March. Jacksonville’s Miami Bass trio 95 South just released their hit, Whoot! There It Is! Things are looking good for 95 South. The world is their oyster.
That is until May of 1993, when a curious tune titled, Whoomp! There It Is!, from the Atlanta Georgia duo Tag Team hit the charts like an overhand right from Riddick Bowe.
95 South, goes “Da fuck? What is this bullshit? This song sounds exactly our song. I mean, exactly. Listen to that chorus!”
Tag Team’s DC Brain Supreme claims the phrase was popular in Atlanta strip clubs and they just grabbed it up and put on in wax, suggesting any similarity in the cadence of the chorus being dictated by the phrase itself.
Carlos Spencer of 95 South, however, tells the story just a little bit differently.
He says they recorded their track at Atlanta’s Digital Edge Studio. Shortly after that, they gave the track to a local DJ to see if he would spin it at the club. That DJ? You guessed it. DC Brain Supreme.
And the plot thickens. Seems DC Brain Supreme knew the cats over at Digital Edge, where they were using a newfangled computer program to make records. It was called Pro Tools, maybe you’ve heard of it.
It’s Spencer’s assertion that DC and Steve Roll’n just went in there and laid their own vocals over the track 95 South had already produced.
Snap.
Either way, it seems Tag Team changed the song just enough. They used some different samples and eschewed the raunchier, sex-based lyrics for a more commercial, party-like tone.
And just like that, 95 South’s track is buried under the rubble of a more intelligible, less sexualized and altogether more mainstream-friendly crossover hit.
Despite Spencer’s claims however, there was never much outward animosity between the 2 groups. They even appeared together in July of that year on The Arsenio Hall Show, where they battled it out for “There It is” supremacy.
For 95 cents a pop, viewers at home could call-in and vote on which group they liked more. That night, it was 95 South that walked away with the crown. Very judicial.
The Billboard Hot 100 Chart tells a different tale however, with Tag Team’s Whoomp! reaching number #2 and staying in the top 10 for an unprecedented 24 non-consecutive weeks. It would become the longest running Top 10 song of all time, a place it held until 1997, when Toni Braxton’s Unbreak My Heart went to 25. Snap again. To date, Whoomp! has sold over 3.5 million copies.
Whoot! There It Is? Well, it never got passed #11. That’s still pretty pretty good, but one can’t help but wonder what that number might look like if Whoomp! didn’t come in hot, stealing all it’s thunder, and potentially confusing consumers, who may have even preferred Whoot! and unwitting purchased Whoomp!
It’s not all sour grapes for the “Bass Mechanics” CC Lemonhead and Jay Ski though, the duo responsible from producing Whoot!. They had 2 other hits with separate groups, hits that you may even be familiar with . One was with the 69 Boyz track called the Tootsie Roll. The other was The Quad City DJ’s C’Mon N Ride It (The Train.) And that’s not to mention their crowning achievement, the 1996 Title Track Space Jam. Eat that shit, Tag Team.
But of course, Tag Team edges out 95 South here in one small, but very important way; they segued pop dominance into Monster Rap gold. No small potatoes around these parts.
So with that being said, Halloween Shindig presents The Golden Raspberry’s Worst Song from a Film 1993 and Mikey Rotella’s pick for worst Monster Rap of all time, it’s Tag Team’s Addams Family (Whoomp!)
This song’s for the movie and the dance floor!
