Pump up the Jam
By Technotronic
“You cannot invent any new music genres out of nowhere. ”
There is always a multitude of coincidences that lead to the discovery of new musical sub-genres and style variations. Pump Up The Jam was the tip of the iceberg of what happened in the Belgium music scene between 1985 and 1989. European DJs and music producers were rapidly evolving and creating multiple musical styles.
A blend of new wave, hi-NRG, EBM, and acid house generated the new beat era. This new genre was accidentally invented in 1987 in the nightclub Ancienne Belgique (AB) in Antwerp when DJ Dikke Ronny played the 45 rpm EBM record Flesh by the band A Split-Second at 33 RPM, with the pitch control set to +8.
Two years later, Pump Up The Jam became one of the most successful new beat tracks. The song gained immense popularity and dominated the charts worldwide in 1989 when it was released by Technotronic, a project by Jo Bogaert (aka Thomas de Quincey), a Belgian musician, songwriter, and record producer. Because of the incredible selling results of Pump Up The Jam, Bogaert, and the record labels, SBK and EMI decided to release more material as an album with the same song title.
The success of the two leading hit singles, Pump Up The Jam and Get Up, brought them to even open for Madonna's Blond Ambition World Tour in 1990. It's not hard to imagine why that happened. If you listen to Come Back, another track from the album, after 30 seconds, when the melody begins, it's easy to imagine the voice of Madonna singing on the track. This is just a feeling I have, and it didn't happen in reality, but it's a pretty noticeable influence the new beat music scene had on the American singer's albums of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
In contrast to EBM, new beat records were mainly produced to enter the international music charts. The easy melodies and catchy choruses of Pump Up The Jam and Get Up probably amplified this desire for commercial success. A typical element of the 1980s golden years of music that generated a multitude of similar-sounding songs and new record labels that were very interested in investing and publishing new beat records, especially in Europe.
Pump Up The Jam's initial album cover and early promotional videos featured a model named Felly, who lip-synched vocals performed by Belgian emcee Manuela Kamosi (aka Ya Kid K). Thankfully, further videos featured the real singer Kamosi instead when this was discovered. A lesson learned. Following the success of another track taken from the album, Move This, which was released as a single in the USA, the album was then reissued in 1992 with Ya Kid K on the cover, billed as Technotronic featuring Ya Kid K, with Felly's name removed from the credits in the booklet.
Despite becoming a huge business affair, the new beat considerably contributed to the development of electronic music as we know it today, a genre based on giant Moog synth bass lines and 808 drum machine beats. Dance and electronic musicians will then sample many tracks coming from this fundamental music period in the following decades.
