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"He got stupid. He shot an arrow like Cupid. He used words that didn&amp;#x2019;t mean nothing, like &amp;quot;loopid.&amp;quot; Humpty Hump was his name and he single-handedly saved the summer of 1990, easily the worst radio summer of all time. Let us now celebrate 20 years of &amp;quot;The Humpty Dance,&amp;quot; summer jam of summer jams, the song that has kept a grateful nation getting busy in Burger King bathrooms ever since.\r\nSometimes a summer song fights its way out of a crowded pack. Like, what was the summer song of 1984 or 2003? You might say &amp;quot;When Doves Cry&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Crazy In Love,&amp;quot; while someone else would go for &amp;quot;Ghostbusters&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Seven Nation Army,&amp;quot; maybe even &amp;quot;Missing You&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Ignition (Remix).&amp;quot; But any fan can agree these were jam-packed summers for pop radio. Other years, there&amp;#x2019;s a clear-cut champ &amp;#x2014; no matter what else you cranked on the beach in 1994, there was only one &amp;quot;Gin and Juice,&amp;quot; and despite all the great tunes kicking around in 2006, Gnarls Barkley&amp;#x2019;s &amp;quot;Crazy&amp;quot; was first among equals. But 1990 was a dismal little sweatbox &amp;#x2014; you&amp;#x2019;d have to reach back to the pre-Beatles era to search for a radio summer that weak. There was only one song everyone could agree on, one song you could blast at a party without driving everyone out to the porch. And that song was &amp;quot;The Humpty Dance.&amp;quot;\r\nDigital Underground had already released a fantastic hip-hop twelve-inch in the late summer of &amp;#x2019;89, &amp;quot;Doowutchalike,&amp;quot; which built up huge anticipation for their debut album, Sex Packets. Humpty Hump had a cameo in that tune, saying, &amp;quot;Homegirls, for once, forget you got class! See a guy you like, just grab him in the biscuits!&amp;quot; When the Bay Area crew finally dropped Sex Packets that winter, everyone seemed to feel hugely disappointed and forgot about it. But a few months later, &amp;quot;The Humpty Dance&amp;quot; began showing up on MTV and the radio, and blew everything else away. That soles-of your feet bassline. That &amp;quot;Do me baby!&amp;quot; hook. That tone-deaf male chorus, that irresistible &amp;quot;let&amp;#x2019;s get stupid&amp;quot; gear change at the end, all those cornball jokes about how he likes his oatmeal (lumpy) and his beats (funky). Humpty had the whole song to himself, crowing, &amp;quot;Both how I&amp;#x2019;m living and my nose is large!&amp;quot;\r\nThere were a few other worthy hip-hop singles that summer &amp;#x2014; A Tribe Called Quest&amp;#x2019;s &amp;quot;Can I Kick It,&amp;quot; YZ&amp;#x2019;s &amp;quot;Tower With The Power,&amp;quot; Roxanne Shante&amp;#x2019;s &amp;quot;Brothers Ain&amp;#x2019;t Shit&amp;quot;&amp;#x2014; but none of them came close to going pop. And Top 40 radio was in sorry-ass shape &amp;#x2014; this was a time when Nelson could look like a sign of life. MC Hammer&amp;#x2019;s &amp;quot;U Can&amp;#x2019;t Touch This&amp;quot; still lingered on from the spring. Wilson Phillips and En Vogue both scored horrific hits called &amp;quot;Hold On.&amp;quot; Jon Bon Jovi tried to get serious with &amp;quot;Blaze of Glory.&amp;quot; There were niche hits that people loved to argue about: Deee-Lite&amp;#x2019;s &amp;quot;Groove Is In The Heart&amp;quot; (which I loved), Snap&amp;#x2019;s &amp;quot;The Power&amp;quot; (which I hated), Madonna&amp;#x2019;s &amp;quot;Hanky Panky&amp;quot; (which has to be one of the strangest Top 10 hits in history). But it was &amp;quot;The Humpty Dance&amp;quot; that kept us sane enough to keep the arguments going. All summer long, I went to house parties where they played it six times. At one of these parties I tried spinning Public Enemy&amp;#x2019;s &amp;quot;911 Is A Joke,&amp;quot; but it instantly cleared all females off the dance floor, pissing off my housemates yet giving us all a new appreciation for Humpty Hump.\r\nHumpty seemed to go hand in hand with the &amp;quot;Black Bart&amp;quot; t-shirts that were equally ubiquitous that summer. The Simpsons had only been on the air for a few months, yet everywhere you went, you saw bootleg Black Bart shirts. (The other big t-shirt that summer? Washington D.C. mayor Marion Barry had just gotten busted smoking crack on camera, so if you lived in D.C., Virginia or the Carolinas, you saw a lot of &amp;quot;THE BITCH SET BARRY UP&amp;quot; shirts.) Like Bart, Humpty became part of the culture, an Eshu-Elegba trickster god in Groucho drag, the stuff of legend. He made occasional reappearances in Digital Underground&amp;#x2019;s music &amp;#x2014; he got married in &amp;quot;Tie the Knot,&amp;quot; and defended his nose as an Afrocentric political statement in &amp;quot;No Nose Job.&amp;quot; But we all owe him for &amp;quot;The Humpty Dance.&amp;quot; Thank you, Humpty Hump. All over America, Burger King employees are still mopping up after you.\r\n            "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/celebrating-20-years-of-the-humpty-dance-20100527>