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Shut Up & Dance ft. Ragga Twins - Lamborghini (Lamborghini, Shut Up And Dance, 1989)
Eurythmics’ Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) set to breakbeats, with the Ragga Twins toasting over the top. Acid magic.
Shut Up & Dance’s brazen sampling eventually caught up with them after Raving, I’m Raving, featuring ex-dancehall DJ Peter Bouncer, hit number two on the British charts in 1992. The success brought copyright lawyers from at least six major labels, responding to obvious transgressions against their artists. SUAD spent two years of legal wrangling, in similar fashion to American hip-hop contemporaries like Biz Markie and De La Soul. The hassles eventually bankrupted their label. [1]
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Rum & Black - Fuck The Legal Stations (Fuck The Legal Stations / I’m Not In Love, Shut Up And Dance, 1990)
Shut Up & Dance’s PJ and Smiley as Rum & Black — 100% vol., without ice. Samples from Prince’s Let’s Go Crazy and Ice Cube’s Turn Off The Radio.
Philip ‘PJ’ Johnson and Carl ‘Smiley’ Hyman ran their own small North London sound system along with friend DJ Hype. Initially the music had been strictly Reggae but after Smiley had visited his mum who lived in New York in 1986, they began to drop the occasional hip-hop tune into their set. This developed further as they then started MCing in Jamaican style over the breaks. By 1988, PJ and Smiley had begun to make records as Shut Up & Dance. As avid hip-hop dancers both PJ and Smiley initially wanted to make what they called ‘fast hip-hop’, (mirroring the speed of the break in old funk tunes) so they were somewhat surprised when a friend told them that a record they had made was being played at an acid house club. It was indeed true and soon they began to hear their music being played on all the pirate radio stations. Although they never really got involved in the rave scene they started to make records for it. In their own minds they made records with ‘one-side house, one-side hip-hop’. In fact they were making proto-jungle and when they joined forces with their MC heroes from their youth, The Ragga Twins, they paved the way for the union of Rave and Reggae culture. [1]
