"C'mon N' Ride It (The Train)" — Quad City DJ's
The 1996 Florida bass hit built on a Barry White sample and a chanted, ride-the-train hook, and still a fixture at ballgames. It reached #3 on the Hot 100, and the same crew went on to record the Space Jam theme.
Quad City DJ's were veterans before they had a hit under that name. Producers Jay Ski (Johnny McGowan) and C.C. Lemonhead (Nathaniel Orange) teamed up in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1988. As the production duo the Bass Mechanics, they made 95 South's platinum "Whoot, There It Is" (Jay Ski was also one of 95 South's members), and they produced 69 Boyz' "Tootsee Roll." At the "Tootsee Roll" video shoot they met a dancer, JeLanna "Lana" LaFleur, who turned out to sing too, and in 1996 the three became Quad City DJ's. The "Quad" was a local word for bass.
"C'mon N' Ride It (The Train)" came out in early 1996. It was built on a sample of Barry White's 1974 "Theme from Together Brothers," with a chanted hook about riding the train. The song reached #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 and went platinum, and the album Get On Up and Dance, released that June, went platinum too. Critics mostly treated it as good fun. Billboard's Larry Flick warned that "this is one of those records that requires the mind to be turned off," since taking the train-and-ride double entendres too seriously would only annoy you. AllMusic noted that the album, "hovering at an average of 132 beats per minute," never made "the mistake of including a ballad." The Village Voice named it the number-one song of 1996.
That year Atlantic executive Craig Kallman asked the group to write the theme for Michael Jordan's Space Jam, and "Space Jam" reached #37. Billboard called it "a fitting sequel" and Entertainment Weekly called it a "shameless Xerox." The train song outlasted it. Pitchfork put it on a 2010 list of "Actually Good 90s Jock Jams," Rolling Stone ranked it #86 among the greatest dance songs of all time in 2022, and it still plays at sporting events; the NFL used it to promote its 2025 kickoff.
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