According to one of our preferred musical sources:
PEAKED: #2 on June 7, 1997
SONG AT #1 THAT WEEK: Hanson – “MMMBop”
This column is at the request of the Stereogum donors at CafeMedia Ad
Management. They write, “Our selection of ‘Return Of The Mack’ by Mark
Morrison is brought to you by popular vote from the CafeMedia team.”
There’s something so profoundly satisfying about the idea of the bounce-back
— of suffering some kind of loss or humiliation but then using it as fuel.
The bounce-back is never a simple thing. Emotions get messy, and very few
triumphs are great enough to erase heartbreak or failure from a human mind.
But the narrative is great — that whole idea of “fuck you, I’m doing great.” That’s the
feeling embodied by Mark Morrison’s “Return Of The Mack,” one of the great
bounce-back songs in pop music history.“Return Of The Mack” is an ideal dumped-guy anthem. It’s breezy and fun and
just ridiculously catchy, and its feeling isn’t stuck in the sting of
betrayal. Instead, Morrison sounds transformed, confident, ready to go. Most
of the song’s lyrics are about betrayal, about the ex who liiiied to him, but Morrison won’t let that bring him down. Instead, he’s
focused on his come-up, on the return of the mack. When he wails out “oh my god!,” it’s like he can’t believe how fly he’s about to become. That’s
beautiful.On the “Return Of The Mack” bridge, we hear a bit about the relationship
that brought Morrison down in the first place. A woman’s voice gets
impatient with Morrison: “Ahh, Mark, stop lying about your big break. For
god’s sake, I need a real man.” (That voice belongs to Angie Brown, a
veteran session singer and the featured guest on Bizarre Inc’s 1992 single
“I’m Gonna Get You,” which peaked at #47 in the US.) That seems to be the source of the
wound. Morrison talks a big game about becoming a superstar, but she’s sick
of waiting around for him. That hurts, but you can understand why she might
be skeptical. Mark Morrison is, after all, a British R&B singer, and
British R&B singers didn’t often become international stars in the late
’90s.Mark Morrison was born in West Germany, and his parents came from the
Bahamas. He also lived in Miami for a while as a kid. But Morrison mostly
grew up in the English city of Leicester. (When Morrison was born, the #1
single in the US was Roberta Flack’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.”) He started making music in 1993, but his career really started later.
In 1995, Morrison spent a few months in prison after a nightclub brawl, and
the experience convinced him to devote himself to music full-time. Later
that year, his single “Crazy” made the UK top 20. “Crazy,” like “Return Of
The Mack,” is a hard-strutting club track that doesn’t have anything to do
with the different variations on techno and house that were dominating the
UK charts at the time. Instead, “Crazy” gets its juice from dancehall and
from new jack swing, the kinetic and rap-adjacent form of R&B that had
come out of the US in the late ’80s.
I was living in London when new jack swing first came along and made its
presence known, and pretty much every kid I knew went nuts for that stuff,
me included. At the time, Bobby Brown, an artist who will eventually appear
in The Number Ones, felt like a legit contender to Michael Jackson’s top-dog
status. Bobby Brown’s success faded, but I love the idea that the UK was
still all-in on new jack swing more than a half-decade later.Morrison followed up “Crazy” with “Return Of The Mack” in March of 1996.
Morrison wrote the song, and he co-produced it with Phil Legg, a UK producer
who’d done a lot of work with the London singer Des’ree. (Des’ree’s
highest-charting US single, 1994’s “You Gotta Be,” peaked at #5. It’s a 4.) The “Return Of The Mack” beat is built almost
entirely out of samples. The purring electric piano comes from “Games,” a
1992 single from the R&B singer Chuckii Booker. (“Games” peaked at #68. Chuckii Booker’s highest-charting single, 1989’s “Turned
Away,” peaked at 42.) The needly guitar sounds and some of the drums come
from “Genius Of Love,” the 1981 dance classic from Talking Heads offshoot Tom Tom Club.
(“Genius Of Love” peaked at #31. Another track with a “Genius Of Love”
sample will eventually appear in The Number Ones.) Other drum sounds came
from “Rocket In The Pocket,” a 1978 live record from the Italo-disco producer Cerrone. (Cerrone’s
highest-charting single, 1977’s “Supernature,” peaked at #70.)There were other samples, too, like the staccato siren sounds from ESG’s
culty 1981 club classic “UFO.” There are echoing, buried-in-the-mix
scratches: “Huh hah” grunts from Treacherous Three’s “Feel The Heartbeat,” “Good!” from Run-DMC’s “Peter Piper,” “straight gangsta mack” from Digital
Underground’s “The Humpty Dance.” (“The Humpty Dance,” from 1990, peaked at #11, which is the only thing
stopping me from giving it a 10.) Effectively, Morrison and Legg were doing
what good rap and R&B producers did in the ’90s. They took sounds that
were floating around in the ether — often, sounds that had been sampled
dozens of times — and blended them into a seamless whole that felt new.And “Return Of The Mack” really rides. The huge drums, the itchy little guitar stabs, the tremendous strut-roll
of the bassline — it all works together. Morrison sings over all of it with
a breezy nasal intensity. You can’t place his accent as British or as
anything else. It’s just a voice in love with itself, shaking off old
betrayals. When Morrison sings that you lied to him, he doesn’t even sound
mad. He just sounds excited that his mack is returning. He’s in full-on
party mode even when he’s talking about his lowest moments.The dissonance between Morrison’s heartbroken lyrics and the wild exuberance
of the song itself is the secret weapon of “Return Of The Mack.” Morrison
says that he cried, but he doesn’t sound like someone who’s been crying.
Instead, he drips triumphant swagger all over everything. Unlike many of the
other R&B singers who scored hits in the ’90s, Morrison never ever slows
to show off his voice. Instead, he floats on top of the groove, radiating
just-set-free relief. The video reinforces all that. Director Jake Nava,
whose work will eventually appear in The Number Ones, films Morrison
partying his way through London, his hair immaculately angular and his
chunky chain enormous. (Morrison’s whole style in the video is pure
late-’80s, which fits the new jack swing feel of the song perfectly.)“Return Of The Mack” went to #1 in the UK, and Morrison released
his Return Of The Mack album a month after the single came out. In the UK, the album was big
enough to send five singles into the top 10. “Return Of The Mack” also hit
big throughout Europe. Finally, the song slowly caught on in the US,
lingering in the Hot 100 for the better part of a year and finally peaking
at #2 more than a year after it had topped the UK chart.The trans-Atlantic delay worked out nicely for the song. It meant that
“Return Of The Mack” became a summer jam in America during the year that Bad
Boy was running everything. Morrison’s bounce-back joy, the track’s hard and
club-ready bounce, and its subconscious-tug samples all fit nicely in the
time that Puff Daddy’s bottle-popping euphoria fully captured American pop.
(In fact, “Return Of The Mack” hit #2 in the US during one of the few 1997
weeks when a Puffy-affiliated record wasn’t at #1.)Otherwise, though, Mark Morrison’s timing was not good. After “Return Of The
Mack,” Morrison had a real chance at global pop stardom. His album, I
learned while writing this, is really good, and some of those other UK hits
probably could’ve crossed over in the US. But as “Return Of The Mack” was
starting to gain traction in the US, Morrison was arrested for trying to
bring a stun gun on a plane. Later on, he was in a nightclub fight that
resulted in someone getting killed. He was sentenced to community service,
but he tried to hire a lookalike to do his service for him, and he wound up
in prison for a year.After “Return Of The Mack,” only one more Mark Morrison track even touched
the US charts. (1997’s “Moan & Groan” peaked at #76.) Morrison has had a
series of arrests and legal issues in the years since, though he’s still
making records. Last month, he got really mad at the mayor of Leicester.
Morrison had an idea to open up a studio to keep kids off the street and to
offset a recent outbreak of knife crime, but the mayor snubbed him. So now
Mark Morrison is threatening to run for mayor. I hope he runs, and I hope he wins. I want to hear “Return Of The Mayor.”GRADE: 9/10 Stereogum.com
