Deee-Lite – "Groove Is in the Heart' (1990)

Your groove I do deeply dig

No walls, only the bridge

My supper dish, my succotash wish

I am a very successful trivia player, but I freely admit that a higher power is responsible for much of my success.

As you probably know, the University of Michigan’s football team – coached by Jim Harbaugh – is this year’s national championship.  One of our trivia questions this week asked who was the Michigan football coach when the team last won the national championship.

That very morning, I had finalized a 2 or 3 lines post about Tom Brady and the late Frank Ryan – a couple of men who became outstanding NFL quarterbacks after spending a good part of their college football careers sitting on the bench.

Here’s the first sentence of that post:

During his very successful 13-year stint as the head football coach at the University of Michigan, Lloyd Carr’s teams won five Big Ten titles and the 1997 national championship.  

I wasn’t 100% sure that Michigan hadn’t finished atop the college football rankings sometime between Carr’s 1997 title and Harbaugh’s 2023 championship.  But as I recalled, the period after Carr’s retirement and before Harbaugh’s ascension to the head coaching job had been a dry spell for the Wolverines.  So I felt pretty safe in answering “Lloyd Carr” to the trivia question.

If that question had been asked at the previous week’s trivia contest, there is NO WAY I would have come up with the right answer.  (Lloyd who?)

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It was at least a million-to-one shot that I would not only choose to write a 2 or 3 lines post that mentioned Lloyd Carr and the fact that one of his University of Michigan football teams had won a national championship, but also that I would do that less than 24 hours before my team was asked to answer a question about Carr’s accomplishment.  

Lloyd Carr

In other words, it was one hell of a coincidence – if it was a coincidence at all.

Some people don’t believe in coincidences.  For example, Albert Einstein famously said that “Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.”

The great Russian author Vladimir Nabokov saw the world a bit differently:

A certain man once lost a diamond cufflink in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish . . . but there was no diamond inside.

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I think I heard today’s featured record back in the nineties, but it had fallen off my radar until I heard it recently while watching an episode of Big Mouth on Netflix.

If you haven’t seen Big Mouth, it’s a remarkably vulgar and offensive animated series.  Netflix wouldn’t dare air a live-action show about middle schoolers that was as explicit and filthy as Big Mouth is, but the rules are apparently very different for animated shows.  (In one scene, two 13-year-olds kiss and dry hump each other until the boy makes a mess in his pants – said mess-in-pants being very plainly depicted.)

The brains behind Deee-Lite was Lady Miss Kier (née Kierin Magenta Kirby in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1963).  “Groove Is in the Heart” – which made it all the way to the #4 spot on the Billboard “Hot 100” – also featured Parliament-Funkadelic’s Bootsy Collins and A Tribe Called Quest’s Q-Tip.

Click here to watch the official music video of “Groove Is in the Heart.”  (The slide whistle is m-o-n-e-y!)

Click here to buy the record from Amazon.