Grunge. Wu-Tang Clan. Radiohead. “Wonderwall.” The music of the ’90s was as exciting as it was diverse. But what does it say about the era—and why does it still matter? 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s is back for 30 more episodes to try to answer those questions. Join Ringer music writer and ’90s survivor Rob Harvilla as he treks through the soundtrack of his youth, one song (and embarrassing anecdote) at a time. Follow and listen for free on Spotify. In Episode 88 of 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s—yep, you read that right—we’re doing the “Macarena.” Below is an excerpt of this episode’s transcript.
You know what? Fuck it.
Listen, we can all sit around dreading this for the next 45 minutes, or we can get it out of the way. August 26, 1996. Chicago, Illinois. The United Center, home of the Chicago Bulls. The Democratic National Convention begins. This description will be brisk. Four days of righteous speechifying and awkward revelry. Your Democratic presidential nominee is Bill Clinton, seeking reelection, having prevailed in 1992. Spoiler alert: He will handily prevail in November ’96 as well, defeating Republican Bob Dole, along with spunky third-party candidate and galaxy-brained visual-aid enthusiast Ross Perot. The Bulls won the NBA championship that year, beating out the Seattle SuperSonics. Bill Clinton is Michael Jordan, Bob Dole is Sonics point guard Gary Payton, and Perot is, I don’t know, Sonics big man Detlef Schrempf. That analogy needs some work.
Clinton’s victory feels preordained, all right? The vibe at the DNC in Chicago as summer ends is therefore boisterous. There is an incumbent cockiness, a raucousness, a jovial sloppiness. A semi-charismatic complacency. It is not “Morning in America” (that was Reagan’s whole deal), but it is, perhaps, “Brunch in America.” Ughhh. I said this would be brisk. They dance the fuckin’ Macarena, OK? Infamously. And this infamous video footage of various power brokers and luminaries at the 1996 DNC dancing the Macarena—to put it mildly and briskly—this footage is unpleasant to look upon.
This video is all over YouTube, of course; my favorite upload of this clip is entitled simply, “The 1996 DNC Was Lit.” Brisk! Nero all line-dancing as Rome burns. Jesus. I’m so glad they got the Anne Bancroft clip from The Graduate in there. I’m not trying to seduce you blaring over the PA at the DNC as Bill Clinton seeks reelection. Stupendous. Brisk! Brisk! There she is, Bill’s doting wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, beaming, radiant, clapping, and pointedly—if you want the truth—wisely not even trying to do the dance. She looks genuinely happy. She looks relatively carefree. I said brisk! There they are, various Democratic big shots and randos alike, onstage and off, comfortable and less comfortable, coordinated and not, doing the Macarena. Doing the dance. You know the dance. Our dear friend, the author and critic Tom Breihan, writing in his Stereogum column The Number Ones, writes, “You didn’t need much sense of rhythm to do the Macarena. You didn’t need to remember too many steps. You simply had to be aware of the location of your chest, head, and butt, and you needed to be able to put your hands on those parts in sequence. Few dance crazes are quite so undemanding.” That’s why Tom’s the best.
Not everybody at the DNC is up to even that challenge, of course. There’s a white-haired, rumpled-suited older gentleman, he’s onscreen for like three seconds, but he’s clearly got no idea where his chest, head, and butt are. He’s just grasping wildly at various parts of his body. If the camera had stayed on him for even 10 seconds longer we probably could’ve watched him basically strangle himself. Brisk! It’s awkward, dude. It is lit but also cringe. It is a cursed visual document. It’s like the killer videotape in The Ring if the scary girl in the well had signed the 1994 crime bill. This footage is unpleasant to look upon. Don’t go watch it now, even as a joke. Don’t do it. Don’t. No. Quit it. There is incumbent vice president Al Gore, some time later, kicking off his own righteous DNC speech with a little joke.
I said we’re getting this out of the way and I meant it; I said this description will be brisk and I tried.
And then he stands there motionless and unsmiling, because Al Gore is famously stiff and rhythmically challenged and humorless. It’s a self-aware little joke.
There. We got it out of the way.
Oprah. Oprah learning the dance on the beach with three swole, shirtless lifeguards, and then teaching the dance to her raucous and sloppy studio audience, and her audience starts clapping off-beat immediately, and yet overall this footage is significantly more pleasant to look upon, if only because other than Oprah herself, none of these people are trying to run the country.
Yankee Stadium. 50,000 Yankees fans doin’ the Macarena. Setting the record, apparently, for the most people doing the Macarena, a record very recently set by a crowd at the Kingdome in Seattle, at a Mariners game. Seattle just getting their asses kicked left, right, and center in ’96.
We even got the Yankees grounds crew doin’ the Macarena, and doing it quite well, in fact, although as a crew member named Brian Cooney explained to the Associated Press, “We rehearsed for about six hours. I think we got it down pretty good.” Six hours. Six hours to find your butt, Brian. That better have been a little joke, Brian. If you believe YouTube commenters, and why not, Macarena Night at Yankee Stadium was also Sock Night, uh, Commemorative Sock Night, and dudes in the upper deck started throwing balled-up socks on the field. Quite a memorable evening at Yankee Stadium overall. The Mariners beat the Yankees 6 to 5, so suck it. Some of those sock-throwers kinda were running the country at that point, I suspect.
Atlanta, Georgia. The 1996 Olympics. The Gymnastics Gala. The 1996 United States women’s gymnastic team. The Magnificent Seven. Gold medalists. American heroes. Celebrating their victory and cutting loose with a little dance medley. “Y.M.C.A.”: great addition to that medley, sure. But we all know it’s coming.
We got Olympic legend Kerri Strug—she did the famous vault with the busted ankle, to win gold—Kerri Strug’s out there in an ankle brace doin’ the Macarena. The U.S. women’s gymnastic team’s version of the Macarena dance includes a standing backflip; don’t try that at home, or at Yankee Stadium, or anywhere. Everybody’s into the Macarena. Everybody except this guy.
This gentleman is named MC Rage, based in Las Vegas. He’s a hardcore guy, as in the dance-music genre, not hardcore punk or hardcore the lifestyle. I’m getting major proto–Pete Davidson vibes off MC Rage. That’s neither a compliment nor an insult, that’s a value-neutral Pete Davidson comparison; anyway, “Fuck Macarena” is one of MC Rage’s most prominent musical contributions to society, and I suspect the Yankee Stadium grounds crew spent more time learning to do the dance than he spent writing the song.
What’s going on here? Not What’s going on with MC Rage. I’ve got the gist, I think, of that guy. I mean What’s going on general. I have a friend, my dear friend Tommy, who gets super pissed whenever anyone uses the phrase the Monoculture to describe the way culture used to work, pre-internet, pre–Severe Audience Fragmentation, back when we all had three TV channels and the same five movies in theaters at any given time, and we all used to listen to the same things, watch the same things, like the same things. Jaws, Star Wars, M.A.S.H., Thriller, Johnny Carson, Seinfeld, Avengers: Endgame, Game of Thrones, etc. The Monoculture is dead now, pretty much. My buddy Tommy hates it when people use the term monoculture like that. He starts ranting about how monoculture is about farming and crop rotation and shit. I kinda gotta tune him out, at that point; he gets pretty aggressive. But the Macarena, in 1995 and 1996, did feel monocultural, in the inaccurate sense of the term. If you want the truth, it felt viral, as in “of the nature of, caused by, or relating to a virus.” I don’t mean viral as a compliment or an insult, either. I mean viral in the value-neutral sense.
Back in 2021, Spin magazine wrote about “Macarena,” and quoted professor Robert Thompson, director of Syracuse University’s Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture, and Robert says, “Were we to anoint one song as the official anthem of the end of the second millennium, ‘Macarena’ would do very nicely. Slouching toward Y2K, with Napster and the iPod lurking just around the next corner, we met this timeless oddment as the analog century was slipping away.” That’s one way to put it.
So the music journalist and Billboard magazine editor Leila Cobo wrote a great book called Decoding “Despacito”: An Oral History of Latin Music, 19 chapters, each about a different massive Latin pop hit, from “Feliz Navidad” to Rosalía. “Macarena” gets a chapter, of course, and there’s a scene where a Miami radio DJ named Jammin Johnny Caride, he’s DJing live at a club in Miami. He’s there with his program director at the influential radio station Power 96, and he’s trying to convince his boss that they should play “Macarena” on the radio even though the current remix version is all in Spanish, because every time he puts the song on in the club everyone starts line-dancing immediately. So Johnny says, “And I play the song again and the same thing happens. It was like the bubonic plague. The dance floor clears out, people fall in line, like an army, and they start to do that little dance. The ones who didn’t know it, they learn it on the spot. And the boss looks at me and says, ‘What the hell was that?’”
That is a value-neutral reference to the bubonic plague, I think. My name is Rob Harvilla. This is the 88th episode of 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s. And it’s time. Yes, it is time to deal with “Macarena,” by the Spanish pop duo Los Del Río, the song originally hailing from their 1993 album A Mí Me Gusta, but that’s not the famous version, and overall the chronology gets outta hand super fast. The timeline, and the guest list, this shit gets bonkers, dude.
To hear the full episode click here, and be sure to follow on Spotify and check back every Wednesday for new episodes on the most important songs of the decade. This excerpt has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
