Mark Morrison - Retun of the Mack....works its fucking magic!

c'mon "oh my god!" is such a shoo-in

"top of the world"

ahem
kinder at 10:19 26 May 17

also underrated: Top of the world

it's all about the 'i do do do' fyi

the uncredited woman's vocal contribution in the middle really is something. (is it angie brown, who's credited on the release as a backing vocalist?)

at least the complete version is -- the main, 3.5-minute radio edit of the song abruptly cuts it out right as the excellent "for GOD'S sake!" begins. which, if you're gonna cut *that* out, why not just cut the whole thing? the 4.5-minute edit that appears on most physical editions of the album opted to do just that. the only version of the recording where you can hear it in full is in the extended 7+-minute mix. well, that and the music video. and fortunately, the dj mixes that i hear tend to include the section in full when they play this song.

anyway. that section is so well done and effective that i'm tempted to call it great: the sharp, exasperated intakes of breath, like she's really been through so much to be with this man, how she alternately pleads him to deliver and chastises him for being incapable of following through. it's also such a misogynistic portrayal, as obviously written by men as anything: with the way her pitch rises as she implores him to "stop letting me down!" she sounds unmistakably horny, and voraciously so. nothing this poor man can bring her will ever satisfy her, and she'll always be craving, begging, even screaming for more. it is horrifying to consider that in this section, some men enjoying "return of the mack" could and can imagine their own partners.

but it kind of still is great? it's a more dynamic vocal than anything morrison himself delivers on this overall excellent tune.

I wonder what Morrison is doing for a crust these days. I don't think he had any more big hits after Return Of The Mack, and that was 23 years ago.

two things I love about this

1) the fact that his first single was his "Return", implying that we were supposed to know who "The Mack" was before his very first single

2) that he hired a Mark Morrison impersonator to do his community service while on tour

I've never heard the version of return of the mack that has a woman's vocal on it

"Work it" is now on, and I'm workin it white boy style.
― Chris V. (Chris V), Friday, November 15, 2002 6:47 PM (seventeen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

I'm workin' it white boy style btw

two things I love about this

1) the fact that his first single was his "Return", implying that we were supposed to know who "The Mack" was before his very first single

2) that he hired a Mark Morrison impersonator to do his community service while on tour

once again

The best part of this song is when he sings "Return of the Mack: Oh My GOD!" - it's like he can't believe it himself!

― Spencer Chow (spencermfi), Tuesday, October 12, 2004 8:04 PM bookmarkflaglink

I'm a bit obsessed of late with his 1997 mini-album Only God Can Judge Me (that's Verse I, Chapter II), mostly as a marooned time capsule of how MM was indeed UK tabloid notorious at the time, and was someone with five top ten hits - not just the one he's reduced to now. The record as such is both a victory lap to all this and was presumably intended as the prelude to his next stage in claiming an international audience - when all that happened was he lost the British one he already had and for various reasons never released anything again - bar one single - until the momentum had gone.

Nine tracks wheeze by in 23 minutes but there's only three actual new songs. The rest of it - that heady lost artefact effect in full swing - is an introductory collage of dramatically re-recorded news headlines calling him out over a hip hop beat (pre-Angels solo Robbie Williams and forgotten R&B boy band Damage get named), the Lord's Prayer being recited by a child and later a soul chorus, a lo-fi recording of him hyping up an arena audience in Birmingham by warning any present police officers that their presence is unwelcome, seguing into a Return of the Mack in Italy that is abruptly halted mid-verse, and then Radio 1 interview Lisa I'Anson on air addressing the issue of his feud with, again, fucking Damage ("Smash Hits Awards, they had their dressing room, you came in, saw their dressing room, liked their dressing room, so threw their stuff in the corridor..." His response: "The only damage that Damage is doing to themselves").

In 2023 it plays very opaquely or like some quasi-hauntological parody, which is a major point in its defence, this infallibly self-confident document of things that may have mattered once, or thought to have mattered once, whereas now the events are as obscure and buried as the album itself. As would have already been the case by 2000.