The apotheosis of the Vengaboys’ Eurodance aesthetic was 1999 when they had huge hits with ‘Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom!!’ and the era-defining ‘We’re Going To Ibiza’. So it’s no surprise they want to – by bending the rules of time just as they bent the rules of the mere pop single – take us back to the year when they bestrode the charts like a poorly choreographed colossi.
They are doing so with AI lip sync app Wombo to push their self-explanatory ‘1999 (I Wanna Go Back)’ single.
“The 21st century had failed us – since the turn of the millennium, it all went wrong,” said one of the Vengaboys at a press conference seemingly in front of the United Nations (it wasn’t really). “From Covid to Crocs,” added another one of the Vengaboys, driving the point home. Who, in all honesty, can argue with iron-clad logic like that?
The video from the press conference features cameos from AI-generated versions of David Beckham, the Queen, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gordon Ramsay all talking about how much they miss the 1990s and want to go back.
The actual video for the song is made up of lots of iconic album sleeves from the decade (everything from Dr Dre and Nirvana to Mariah Carey and TLC), all lip syncing to the track.
It is the first artist partnership that Wombo has done. “The people at Wombo got it immediately,” said an unidentified Vengaboy (or maybe all four of them in harmony) in a press release. “They all grew up with our music and feel like family. From the first conversation the ideas grew quickly to find a fun way to look back on some of the icons of the 90’s [sic] that we most respect.”
The single is available on all the usual streaming platforms but – incredibly – it is also being released as a limited-edition CD single so that it captures that 1990s retro zeitgeist.
But if they really wanted to bottle the spirit of that multi-formatting decade, they should have released two CD singles, each including barely different remixes by whoever was ranked somewhere between 20 and 30 on Mixmag’s hottest DJs of the year list.
