Return of the Mack – The Best of Mark Morrison
When wife-and-husband team Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz, aka new wave collective and Talking Heads side project Tom Tom Club, emerged from their Bahamian studio session with 1981’s seminal Genius of Love, they had no idea it would become one of the most iconic, most sampled, most ripped-off beats in hip-hop and R&B.
Grandmaster Flash knew different: “You’re going to be hearing this beat a lot,” he told Tina. “It’s going to be famous.” And boy was he right. For without Genius of Love there is no It’s Nasty by Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five; no Fantasy by Mariah Carey; no Big Energy by Latto; and crucially no Return of the Mack by Leicester-via-Miami R&B bad boy Mark Morrison.
Being for most mid-nineties chart fans their first taste of Mark Morrison’s oeuvre, *Return* of the Mack landed as a curious introduction, and wasn’t, as some thought, a getting-out-of-prison song. However it was written largely at her Majesty’s pleasure; Morrison had received a community service order for a nightclub brawl but had paid a minder to do it for him, later earning himself a custodial sentence for his non-trouble.
Calling to mind the New Jack Swing-era R&B of Montell Jordan and Bobby Brown, ROTM was a hit with American and British audiences alike, peaking at number one in the UK and number two in the US, where it went platinum but was held off the top spot by Hanson’s MMMBop. ROTM was far from Morrison’s only hit; Crazy, Trippin’, Horny and Moan & Groan all reached the UK Top 10, making Morrison the first UK artist in history to have five Top 10 hits from a debut album.
ROTM is proof of the limitless bounty a heritage hit can represent in the sync-meets-social song management era. An inveterate reworker of his catalogue for TV shows, commercials and even political campaigns, Morrison recently partnered with @kiddbogart’s @seekermusicgroup in a multi-million dollar deal that could well see the Mack returning many times over in the coming years. No flies on Mark, who seems determined that his catalogue works as hard for him as his minder once did!
