Haddaway — "What Is Love"

"What Is Love" was the debut single by Haddaway, a Trinidadian-born singer recording for Coconut Records, a label run out of Hennef, a small town near Cologne, Germany. Label partners Dee Dee Halligan and Junior Torello wrote and produced the track, and Coconut released it in January 1993. The sleek, pleading dance number caught fire immediately: number one in at least thirteen countries, number two in Germany, Sweden, and the UK, and number eleven in the United States. It took home two Echo Awards at the 1994 German ceremony, and the Volker Hannwacker-directed video lived in heavy rotation on MTV Europe.

For most of the world that was the story — a monster Eurodance single from the genre's golden year. Its American immortality came later. In the late 1990s, Saturday Night Live's recurring "Roxbury Guys" sketches sent Will Ferrell and Chris Kattan out nightclubbing as the Butabi brothers, silk-shirted and wordless, bobbing their heads to "What Is Love" in perfect unison. The sketches ran and ran, and in 1998 they spawned a feature film, A Night at the Roxbury, with the song all over it.

That second life is why an American who was eleven in 1997 knows every synth stab of a German-produced dance track that peaked at number eleven before they could read the charts. The head-bob outlived the club era, the film, and the sketch — and the question in the chorus still hasn't been answered.