Rhythm Is A Dancer

This club-banger features vocals by Thea Austin. The American singer/songwriter/composer was meant to be the replacement for Snap!'s original lead vocalist Penny Ford, however after laying down the vocals for this track, she left the band. Austin later was lead vocalist on Soulsearcher's UK 1999 Top 10 hit "Can't Get Enough" and Pusaka's 2001 dance club chart topper "You're The Worst Thing For Me." So how did Austin hook up with Snap!? After Penny Ford left the band because of tensions with the group's rapper Turbo B, the German producers who controlled the group called her back to help with arrangements, and asked her to find a replacement female singer from America. In our interview with Penny Ford, she told us: "They paid me a whole lot of money to pick somebody and bring 'em back over here (Germany). Because by that time I had signed with Sony, which meant contractually I could no longer sing for them, because they were BMG. But I was not signed to Sony as a writer. So I could still write for them. So I'm not sure how it sorted out, but the girl that came after me, she was interviewing me in the same way that you are right now for a magazine, and she said she was also a songwriter. Her name is Thea Austin, and she asked me if I would listen to her song. And I don't make a point of listening to everybody's songs, I just can't listen to them all. But I listened to this song and I liked it and I wanted it for my album. So I needed to get rid of her so she didn't need that song anymore. So I asked her if she had a passport. She did, and she happens to come from the same small little ghetto outside of Pittsburgh that Turbo did. And three days later she was on a plane coming over here making another massive hit for Snap!, 'Rhythm is a Dancer.'"

This was the biggest selling single of 1992 in the UK with 582,700 copies sold. It also reached #1 in many other European countries including France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and The Netherlands. In America, it became the third and final Top 40 hit for Snap!, following "The Power" and "Ooops Up."

A memorable and borderline offensive lyric in this song is "I'm as serious as cancer, when I say rhythm is a dancer." Snap's infamous cancer lyric was possibly borrowed from Eric B. & Rakim's song "I Ain't No Joke" from their 1987 album Paid In Full. The couplet in question goes: I got a question as serious as cancer Who can keep the average dancer The line also shows up in the 1988 song "Strong Island" by JVC Force: I'm as serious as cancer, all fun is done