Most of the clubs I went to were hip-hop and top 40. Occasionally we’d go to the *club *clubs, where everyone’s got drinking water and twirling glow sticks, but I rarely knew the names of the songs I was dancing to.
Baby got an Atom Bomb.
That’s a fair point actually. My local back home in the late eighties was rough as fuck and yet this was a guaranteed floor filler:
Man 2 Man Meet Man Parrish - Male Stripper
So were lots of HiNRG tunes by Hazel Dean, Divine etc Might start an 80s dance party thread. (loads of early acid house)
No one’s mentioned “Informer” by Snow yet but it was a mandatory dance song in Canada.
I know it’s not technically a 90’s song but Was (not Was)'s Walk the Dinosaur is just too awesome to pass up.
Not awesome enough to be available in the UK 
Good job, Ike! I almost listed this but I forgot it while I was watching videos.
Here’s some more:
Apollo 440 - Ain’t Talkin’ 'Bout Dub
Atari Teenage Riot - Sick To Death
Future Sound Of London - We Have Explosive
Dang, the one I was gonna close the post with I can’t find online… I’ll be back after I make a video for it…
Phew! Here’s DJ Hurricane - 70’s In The Cut.
As someone who was an every-weekend clubber and regular partygoer for half the nineties, I am astonished. I have never heard >95% of these songs. I have never even heard of >95% of these songs, nor the artists that performed them.
Is everyone trying to seem ultra cool, or were these really the songs that got you and your friends dancing?
I came here expecting acts like Will Smith, Right Said Fred, Sister Hazel, Live, Offspring, Spice Girls and Los Del Rio. In my experience, these were the sort of acts that actually got virtually everyone in the average club or party up and dancing in the 90s. The songs that everyone could dance to regardless of ability, gender, orientation, musical taste or degree/mode of intoxication.
To me, the songs listed so far seem like they were either made by someone not actively going to parties in the 90s, or else trying really hard to seem like they were way too cool to be aware of the commercial acts.
I can not believe that anybody, anywhere ever experienced a time when the opening bars of “Trigger Hippy” were heard, and everyone in the club leapt onto the dance floor and every seat and spot at the bar was empty.
Ever.
I can not even imagine the sort of party where all the girls hear the start of “Frontside” and I get dragged onto the dance floor by virtue of being the nearest sexually compatible guy.
It seems inconceivable.
I could at at least pass a a cool dude in the 90s. We listened to a lot of “alternative” music. We got variously shitfaced to a lot of alternative music. We went to a lot of different types of clubs, raves, house parties (remember those?). But the idea that every one of my friends or everybody at a club or party would know and feel compelled to dance to something as obscure as Baby got an Atom Bomb is just bizarre.
How obscure are these songs? Well, they don’t even have Wikipedia articles. That’s how obscure they are.
Maybe I just had a very diverse circle of friends, but there was no way that *everybody *at any party or club I attended would have known these songs, much less felt compelled to dance to them.
I’m willing to accept that some of these songs will have been bigger in other geographic areas. But the idea that somewhere a circle of friends existed where everybody at a *wedding *knows these songs is way out of my experience.
Ditto.
And only a small number of the real serious drug-using party animals knew every song even in the Chuppa Chup clubs.
I can’t imagine a wedding or regular party where those people comprise all the attendees.
Blake, your post was too long to quote, but yeah, I’ve heard every song I’ve listed at some sort of club or rave. When I say “club”, I’m talking about places like Miami’s Fire & Ice, (UK) Hacienda, Detroit’s Music Institute, Chicago’s Music Box, London’s Shoom, etc.
I went to FSU and Tallahassee had a place called Club Park Ave, commonly known as CPA, that played all manner of dance music, a lot of it white label stuff. Back then techno was like metal in that if you wanted to expand your horizons, you really had to search for stuff and trade tapes and records with people. I remember having to go to certain record stores because that was where certain kinds of music were sold, and if you were there more than a week after a record hit the stores, you were prolly shit outta luck finding whatever it was you were looking for. If Psychic TV isn’t on your radar as a leader in house, acid house and techno, for instance, it’s unlikely you’ll know who Frankie Knuckles, the Hot Mix 5 or Derrick May are.
If you really want to know more about the subculture, I can recommend two fictional films: the docudrama 24 Hour Party People which is about Tony Wilson, his Factory Records and Hacienda Club in Manchester and Groove, which is about a rave in NYC. I can also highly recommend the documentary Better Living Through Circuitry as a good place to start learning about EDM subculture.
And yeah, Atom Bomb was a huge hit, just like Lords Of Acid - Pussy (I once saw this song fill a dance floor at a C&W bar; it was hilarious) and Hallucinogen - Twisted were huge hits.
For many, dance music isn’t something that existed only at a club, it was and is a way of life and thus it’s own little subculture; some of us live inside those subcultures, some of us only know it from the fringes.
Dance music is it’s own incredibly diverse and entwined world, after all, and not all of us are ever dancing to the same tune.
FML for some reason I missed a couple of editing problems with my last post:
That should say “Manchester’s (UK) Hacienda”.
And the Hallucinogen song is LSD, not Twisted; Twisted is the name of the album.
Sorry for any confusion; mea culpa.
Almost all the ones I posted were top 40 UK hits.
(bolding mine)
Here’s the wiki article on Atom Bomb. #20 on the UK charts, used in 2 successful video games, 2 hit movies and another movie’s trailer… hardly obscure, despite the fact that you hadn’t heard of it.
808 State, EMF, Underworld, KLF, Happy Mondays, Sneaker Pimps, Stone Roses, The Charlatans, The Shamen, The Chemical Brothers and on and on…
That pretty much was the soundtrack of the 90s in the UK for me and everyone I know, and that’s what the OP asked for:
From my early 90s frat party dance mix:
Snap - The Power
K7 - Come Baby Come
Naughty by Nature - OPP
Kris Kross - Jump
KLF - 3 am (KLF is Gonna Rock You)
DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince - Boom! Shake the Room
LA Style - James Brown is Dead
2 Unlimited - Get Ready for This!
So much Running Manin those days.
With the exception of Snowboarder Bo and a few other posters, I recognize most of the songs people have listed (in the US). Even the ones I don’t recognize sound like they might be the sort of song one might hear at a rave/techno club or as a deeper track of an old Paul Oakenfold or Ministry of Sound mix cd.
As were all mine - hell, a few were number 1s . And all but The Only Rhyme That Bites have their own Wiki pages.
MC Tunes has his own wiki page though 
But yes, I thought mine were pretty mainstream, stuff that you’d likely find on a pub jukebox, Radio 1 playlisted etc.
Another great Orb track: Little Fluffy Clouds:
