Pop has always eaten itself, but its appetite for nostalgia has become more voracious than ever – particularly for the dance music of the 90s and 00s. There are now numerous singles that reference the era (most often with interpolation, the reusing of a lyric or melodic phrase) in the UK chart: Switch Disco and Ella Henderson’s React – likely rising into the Top 3 this week – samples Robert Miles’ trance classic Children, David Guetta’s Baby Don’t Hurt Me flips Haddaway’s immortal What Is Love, Kim Petras and Nicki Minaj’s Alone recycles the hook of Alice Deejay’s Better Off Alone, and Denham Audio has had a longstanding hit with a version of Strike’s U Sure Do. All of them hark back to an era of bright uncomplicated melodies, big melancholic chords, and messy nights out that went mercifully undocumented on social media.
Jack Melhuish – who, until Warner’s recent layoffs, served as general manager of Parlophone Records UK – says the tipping point for the craze came last year, when David Guetta and Bebe Rexha released I’m Good (Blue), which interpolated Eiffel 65’s Blue (Da Ba Dee) and later hit No 1 on the UK charts. “It wasn’t the first, but in terms of the scale of it, you’d be hard-pressed to find a 90s pop-dance sample that was as flagrant and as blatant as that,” he says. “After that record came out, there was a slight change from the producer and artist community, like: OK, now we can really go for this.”
