Alex Casey watches on in horror as the red shed makes a mockery of a beloved 1999 classic.
For many months in 1999, I’d bring my tape recorder right up to the TV during Coca Cola’s RTR Countdown. I’d sit through ‘Genie in a Bottle’, ‘Man I Feel Like a Woman’ and ‘Boom Boom Boom Boom’ with my finger poised on the record button, waiting for number one. Because, ladies and gentleman, ‘Mambo No. 5 (A Little Bit of….)’ by Lou Bega would always come in at the top spot with that big farting trumpet and that impossibly thin moustache.
Why a song about a philandering German man in a fedora resonated so deeply with an eight-year-old girl in rural South Wairarapa is beyond me, but at least I was not alone. ‘Mambo No. 5’ spent 16 weeks at number one and went platinum thrice over as the highest selling single of 1999 in New Zealand. Sampling a 1949 song by the Cuban artist Dámaso Pérez Prado, Bega struck gold by simply adding in a catchy listicle about all the women he had ever slept with.
“I dated a lot of pretty nice ladies when I was younger,” he said 2014. “These names of my past, you know, just came to me and I wrote it down, got the melody and the rest is history.”
The history he’s referring to is creating one of the most enduring novelty songs and wedding floor fillers of the era. And despite what Neil Finn, who briefly toppled Bega off the number one spot with the doomed All Blacks World Cup supporters song ‘Can You Hear Us’, once told us: history actually always repeats, and ‘Mambo No. 5’ eventually always comes trumpeting back into the present day.
It happened when Michael Scott sang “a little bit of Angela on the thing” in The Office US. It happened when Bob the Builder sang “a little bit of timber and a saw, a little bit of fixing, that’s for sure” on his first album(?). It happened when Lou Bega played 90s nostalgia festival So Pop and lipsynched his way through his 4pm set. And now the latest Mambo-naissance is happening on the most alarming platform of all: an ad for The Warehouse.
The latest campaign for the red shed has plagued the country for nearly a month now, sometimes even playing twice in a row on certain unnamed on demand streamers. It opens with a frazzled mother confronted with a challenging scene: her hubby is burning something on the barbie, her son has just traipsed dirt into the house, and the dog is playing tug-of-war with a cushion. You know what will fix that? A little bit of shopping on the thing.
One, two, three, four, five
Everybody in the car
Come on crew let’s ride
To the Warehouse around the corner
They’ve got every single thing we need
To get our life back in order
Far be it from me to judge, but her subsequent purchases feel like that of a woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown (a kiddie pool, sheets, barbecue tools, outdoor seats, swimsuits, gardening tools, books, BIRD FEEDERS PLURAL). Her trolley overfloweth with random goods, including one of those balls covered in nipples and a book called ‘Natural Care’. Oh, and it bears mentioning again that this is all being SUNG to the tune of MAMBO NO. 5.
You might think that having a little bit of nipple ball in your life is probably when it is time to call it a day, but this woman is utterly manic. “What else do we need? / They probably have it all in store! / Everywhere I look! / There’s bargains galore!” A snorkel mask! Pet treats! Cruskits! Even as a fan of both Lou Bega and Cruskits, I never expected to see the two combine forces. And I hate to say it, but Lou Bega deserves better than both Cruskits, and this chorus:
A little bit of activewear in my life
This brand new dinner set feels just right
A Lego batmobile is all I need
These awesome T-shirts are so sweet
A little bit of sunscreen for the son
A teddy bear to hug me all night long
A comfy pair of new shorts, here I am
A little bit of shopping with the fam
I’ll tip my fedora to the pun re: sunscreen for the son/sun, but I will not clap my hands once, nor clap my hands twice at this total desecration of my sacred Cuban-inspired lothario childhood anthem. The spirit of ‘Mambo No. 5’ is not about awesome T-shirts nor comfy shorts, it is about a womaniser in a huge white suit who sees flirting as “just like a sport” and considers “you can’t run, and you can’t hide” to be a normal thing to say to a woman.
But the biggest annoyance of all is that this ad is all about drumming up attention, which has clearly worked a charm in this instance. Guess I’ll add my name alongside Angela, Pamela, Sandra and Rita as yet another woman to be deeply played by the ‘Mambo No. 5’ multiverse.