1999 Eiffel 65: Blue (Da Ba Dee)

If, in some super museum of the future, there should be a need for a single exhibit to epitomise popular Western music in the nineties, they could do worse that stick 'Blue (Da Ba Dee)' on a plinth under glass. Which may seem a bold statement, but to my ears it's a mish mash of styles and traits that have dominated the sounds of the last ten years. For a start, it's another Europop single (and we all know by now how popular that genre has been), which means it also ticks the ever popular 'dance' box too, so two birds, one stone.

Crucially though, the nod to dance isn't just token - 'Blue (Da Ba Dee)' is more subtle than the overt, crayon bright thump of (for example) 'Barbie Girl' and it threads its pop hook on a credible, trance-like beat and piano loop that would only be unwelcome in the 'cool clubs' through an innate snobbishness. Add in some vocoder treated voices babbling a semi-rapped nonsense lyric that lead into a chorus of monstrous catchiness and you have an artefact that, by summing up everything it ever did or could stand for in three and a half minutes, at a stroke makes ten years of Eurodancebubblegum pop redundant. Which kind of makes it a pity I've had to suffer ten years worth of some awful stepping stone singles when the journey could have been a single simple ladder climb/snake slide (depending on your viewpoint) to get to this point.* Oh, and they're all blokes too and so technically a boyband to boot. See? The nineties in a bottle.


*But apart from that, two other things spoil 'Blue (Da Ba Dee)' for me:

1. That it wasn't actually the last number one of the decade (because how fitting would that have been eh?).

2. That Eiffel 65 saw fit to follow it up with the disturbingly similar yet not one tenth as much fun 'Move Your Body' in 2000, a move that, at a stroke, destroyed their aura of fluky, one hit wonder genius.