Snow — "Informer"

Snow was Darrin O'Brien, a Canadian reggae musician from Toronto who wrote "Informer" in jail — a song about snitches, drawing on a 1989 incident in which he was charged with two counts of attempted murder. Released in August 1992 as the first single from his debut album "12 Inches of Snow", it was produced by MC Shan, who also drops in for a rap verse. The hook everyone remembers, "a licky boom boom down", sat inside verses toasted so fast they became a national guessing game — even the video, directed by George Seminara, leans into the origin story and puts Snow behind bars.

The strangeness worked. "Informer" spent seven consecutive weeks at number one on the US Billboard Hot 100, hit number one in eleven other countries, and reached number two in the UK. Fellow Toronto native Jim Carrey skewered it on In Living Color, which is its own kind of chart position.

The legacy stayed split right down the middle: VH1 ranked it number 84 on its 2007 "100 Greatest Songs of the 90s", while Pitchfork filed it in 2010 among the seven worst US number-one singles of the decade. And the song refused to stay buried — in 2019 Daddy Yankee remade it as "Con Calma" with Snow recording new parts, and the remake topped the charts in twenty countries, giving one of the '90s' oddest hits a second global run.