Paradisio

The wildly joyful Latin dance-pop of Paradisio's "Bailando" was such a massive mixture of watered-down chart tricks that it was easy to lump the song in the same brackets as "Macarena," "Who Let the Dogs Out," "Barbie Girl," and "Mambo #5." Despite the seething Spanish sex of the track's central vocal hook, "Bailando" was actually the product of two Belgium producers, Patrick Samoy and Luc Rigaux, and a vocalist by the name of Maria Isabel Garcia Asensio, an arrangement that resulted in number one positions throughout Europe and what was reported at the time as the most successful single in the history of Sweden. By 1997, the band clearly had a macro-novelty on their hands, a genuinely entertaining, fantasy enriched cross between Europop, Mardi Gras, and cartoon rave culture, but later singles repeated the formula on extremely strict terms, resulting in solid sales but little else. Later that year, a debut LP was rushed out the door and a self-remixed version of that year's "Vamos a la Discoteca" appeared in 2001, suggestively featuring new lead singer Alexandra.