5” was written 70 years ago, in 1949, by Cuban composer and bandleader Pérez Prado. “At the time there were a lot of rappers who said, ‘No, I’m doing my thing.’ But Lou Bega said, ‘Okay, if I have any chance to make money in music, I will do it.’” “ had a good voice, and he is a kind person,” said Goar Biesenkamp, a German music producer and manager who worked with Bega beginning in the late ’90s. It was a one-song project that quickly faded away. “Up and down, down and up / Yeah that’s a summertime cut for those who like to shake butt,” Bega rapped. As a teenager, Bega hoped to break into the music industry as a rapper, and his smooth, gravelly voice can be heard on the 1997 beachy dance track “Let’s Come Together” by Balibu. From Ullstein Bild/Getty Images.īefore he took on a mambo-fied stage name, Lou Bega was David Lubega, son of a Ugandan father and Sicilian mother raised mostly in Munich. To me, flirting is just like a sport.”īega performing in 1999, the year “Mambo No. Beyond the list of women’s names and the trumpet hook sampled from mambo legend Pérez Prado, the song is really about the sloppy, mistake-prone journey of finding love as a young adult. 5” topped the charts across most of Europe, including in Germany, which Americans might be surprised to learn is Bega’s home country (“Rammstein and Lou,” jokes Bega, who lives with his wife and daughter in Munich).īega performed “Mambo” twice this evening-during his set and as an encore-so I hear it for the third time as Bega recites the lyrics to theorize on their relevance. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 and sold 3.3 million copies in the U.S. This summer marks the 20th anniversary of Bega’s debut album, A Little Bit of Mambo, which reached No. 5” while backstage in Eisenhüttenstadt, Germany, a small town near the Polish border, where Bega has just performed at an open-air ’90s concert in the pouring rain.
I’m receiving this textual analysis of “Mambo No. When you actually listen to it as a song, the first verse is about repentance, actually.”
We dance to it-it’s joyful,” Bega says of his 1999 megahit documenting a series of trysts with Monica, Rita, Sandra, Tina, and so on.