FEATURE:
Groovelines
Deee-Lite – Groove Is in the Heart
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A song that ranks…
alongside the important in my life, I remember when the song was released in August 1990. New York’s Deee-Lite put out Groove Is in the Heart and, in doing so, spawned a hit that reached the top spot in Australia and on both the Canadian and U.S. dance chart. The lead single from World Clique, I wanted to know more about the song and its story. I will end with a bit of information regarding Groove Is in The Heart’s legacy and impact. To me, it is one of the defining songs of the 1990s. Its sample are incredible! Fusing Herbie Hancock and Billy Preston, Groove Is in the Heart explodes with vibrancy, cool and colour! It is a joyous and giddy track that is very much a product of the early-1990s. Maybe it is testament to Deee-Lite’s unique spirit, but I have not heard anything like this song or them since. Over thirty years since its release, there is something fresh about the song. Even though it is very much part of the 1990s, one can never grow bored of listening to this classic! DJ Mag spotlighted such an important track on its thirtieth anniversary last year:
“In a dance music world fractured into sub genres and micro niches, there are two things that unite global clubbers in love and admiration: a well organised cloakroom, and Deee-Lite’s ‘Groove is in the Heart’, which celebrates its 30th birthday this year. The New York group’s classic track is infectious, euphoric, nigh-on impossible to dislike. Slice ‘Groove is in the Heart’ in two and it bleeds good vibes and rubbery, melodic funk.
What makes it all the better is how utterly unlikely the song is, a work of pop art that sounds perfectly of its time and eerily prescient. ‘Groove is in the Heart’ is a patchwork quilt of influences, from funk to house, pop to jazz, that shouldn’t work together but somehow do. Its sample-delic Technicolour sound sits beautifully with the collage art of De La Soul’s 1989 album ‘3 Feet High and Rising’, but also foreshadows the cut-and-paste production puzzles that The Avalanches would make their own two decades later.
The band’s origins were similarly cosmopolitan. Deee-Lite were both very New York, their music slotting into the city’s decadent club scene, and globally disparate — DJ Dmitry was from Ukraine, Towa Tei from Tokyo, and Lady Miss Kier from the US — anticipating the explosion in global pop in the late 2010s.
The band’s pan-generic appeal was clear early on, performing in New York’s hip-hop and house clubs, both gay and straight, drawing what Rolling Stone would call “vivid, multiracial, pan-sexual crowds”. Never one to be shy, Kier would design outfits for each gig, with spectacle at a premium. As their buzz grew louder, a major label bidding war ensued and the group signed with Elektra. By this point, a nascent ‘Groove is in the Heart’ — “a love letter to DJs”, according to Kier — was already in their arsenal.
The track that would later launch a million dances is built upon a wonderful collage of samples. There’s a bassline lifted from Herbie Hancock’s ‘Bring Down the Birds’ (then a staple of Dmitry’s DJ sets), drums and whistle taken from from Vernon Burch’s ‘Get Up’, and sound effects from Ray Barreto’s ‘Right On’. Whosampled lists eight samples for the song but there may well be more, a remnant of the days when litigation had yet to catch up with sample culture.
“I wrote the lyrics for ‘Groove Is In The Heart’ before I heard the musical loop,” Lady Miss Kier writes in the sleeve notes for the 2017 reissue of Dee-Lite’s debut album ‘World Clique’. “Dmitry had a record by Herbie Hancock and I can’t remember if he or Towa found the loop, but as soon as I heard it I laid down the melody that was in my head and we all added samples onto it, which I call ‘fills’”.
Insignificant as it might sound, these “fills” would prove hugely important in the song’s success. ‘Groove Is In The Heart’ explodes with kooky, joyful noises — from slide whistles to finger pops, scratches to cowbells — that create the impression that the listener is privy to the best party on earth.
Recording studios are, on the whole, pretty dull places. But it sounded like Deee-Lite were having an absolute ball as they laid it down. “Of course we were enjoying it!” Dmitry tells DJ Mag, “but it was a lot of gruelling work. We were in the studio for 18 hours a day.”
“Although Dmitry played live instruments in our show, myself and Towa didn’t play any instruments,” Lady Miss Kier says, “so we used samples to write music from other people’s music. We were used to the complexity of P-funk and the minimalist nature of Kraftwerk.”
Drizzled into the sonic stew were the contributions of some serious legends. The song reuniting three members of George Clinton’s epochal funk outfits, Parliament Funkadelic — Bootsy Collins on bass, Maceo Parker on saxophone, and Fred Wesley on trombone.
“I wrote Bootsy a fan letter and included our demo, around 1988,” says Kier. “It included the song ‘Groove is in the Heart’. He called back and left a message saying if we ever got a record deal, he would be up for some sessions. I was jumping up and down.”
The song eventually reached number one in Australia, number two in the UK, and number four in the US — a remarkable result in a country that had yet to embrace club culture on a national level. In her liner notes to ‘World Clique’, Lady Miss Kier claimed that the success of ‘Groove is in the Heart’ helped to open up the minds of the rock music industry to dance music.
“We pushed the ‘old boy’ network of rock promoters to accept DJ culture and dance music whilst on tour by having DJs as openers,” she says. “We stayed firm on our nightclub roots when the label was asking just to keep it POP! Instead we spotlighted Vogueing in our shows and influenced many artists at the time.”
While further hits of the same magnitude may have eluded them, Deee-Lite’s musical moment did not come and go with ‘Groove is in the Heart’. 'World Clique' is a wonderful piece of work, a vivacious patchwork of New York clubland and sharp pop hooks not a million miles away from St Etienne or Róisín Murphy. The group would later be remixed by titans of electronic music from Masters at Work to Carl Craig, the mixes rounded up on the epic 1996 compilation ‘Sampladelic Relics & Dancefloor Oddities’”.
I can never tire of the luminous and irresistible Groove Is in the Heart. It is no shock that the song has been lauded and acclaimed through the years. This Wikipedia article gives us more details regarding the legacy of one of the greatest songs ever:
“In 2003, Q Magazine ranked "Groove Is in the Heart" at number 323 in their list of the "1001 Best Songs Ever". VH1 placed it at No. 67 in their list of "100 Greatest Songs of the 90s" in 2007. Pitchfork named it the 59th best track of the 1990s. They wrote: "With their sass-tastic frontwoman and kitsched-to-death fashion sense, Deee-Lite probably seemed like a good bet at a time when pop's future was still up for grabs. If you were a kid in the 'burbs, they almost resembled a Daisy Age hip-hop group (the day-glo/flower-power look, the Q-Tip guest rap) as much as a house act (a strange urban subculture we had little access to in junior high)."
In 2011, The Guardian featured the song on their "A history of modern music: Dance". In April 2017 the single was re-released on pink vinyl, as part of Record Store Day with remixes of "What Is Love?" on the B-Side. BuzzFeed listed the song number 3 in their "The 101 Greatest Dance Songs of the '90s" list in 2017.
In 2018, Time Out listed the song number 23 in their list of "The 100 best party songs", adding: "In this tale of New York's anything-is-possible East Village of the late '80s, a trio of candy-coloured club kids – Super DJ Dmitri, Lady Miss Kier and Towa Tei – decide to form a band. The threesome (with a little help from ringers Q-Tip, Maceo Parker and Bootsy Collins) come up with 'Groove Is in the Heart', a sweetly innocent percolator of a tune that, against all odds, becomes the worldwide club smash of 1990. True story!"
In 2021, Rolling Stone ranked the "Groove Is in the Heart" at 223 in its updated list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, calling it "a collage across different generations of funkateers”.
A song with such an interesting background; one that has grown through the years and reached so many people, I was excited to include it in Groovelines. A dancefloor favourite, it is a shame that Deee-Lite are no longer recording together. I guess it would be hard to recapture the thrill and originality of Groove Is in the Heart and the World Clique album. Such an amazing and timeless song, spin Groove Is in the Heart and let it…
LIFT the spirits high.