“Groove Is in the Heart,” the debut single of quintessential New York dance act Deee-Lite, was a blur of frantic tambourine jingles, slide whistles, a stuttering Eva Gabor sample, Bootsy Collins interjections, a Q-Tip verse, and lyrical references to succotash and Horton Hears a Who!. No wonder the beguiling track caught on like a polyester body suit on fire. “We’re going to dance… We’re going to dance… We’re going to dance, and have some fun.” As introductory proclamations go, those words were nearly as direct and promising as, “Let there be light.”
Radio was ready for the trio. The single, which sported a four-on-the-floor stomp, was released a little more than a month after the first house song to hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, Madonna’s “Vogue,” wrapped its three-week stretch at the summit. In the summer of 1990, house-inflected dance pop was hot. Deee-Lite’s smash sounded like many things (chiefly Herbie Hancock’s “Bring Down the Birds,” from which “Groove” cribbed its bassline), but nothing quite sounded like it, not even within the group’s own discography. Its popularity was boosted by its video, in which Deee-Lite vamp in front of psychedelic displays that at times approximate moving tie-dyes. The video opens with singer Lady Miss Kier asking questions that seem both self-explanatory and impossible to answer correctly (“How do you say deee-groovy? How do you say deee-gorgeous?”). What’s notable is not merely how weird everything is, but how confidently it’s delivered. If the public was confused, Deee-Lite surely weren’t.
Their pride—combined with their thrifted ’70s looks—brought a downtown New York aesthetic to mainstream culture. Deee-Lite ran in the same circles as the “club kids” who became talk-show staples in the early ’90s (RuPaul and Michael Alig among them). They might have come off as intimidatingly cool if their song, whose main hook consisted of Kier singing the words of the title four times in different catchy iterations, weren’t so accessible.
Deee-Lite had spent most of the late ’80s gigging around New York (specifically downtown Manhattan), building a reputation as purveyors of retro pop-funk and eventually house music, which already taken hold in major U.S. metros like Chicago and New York. The road to Deee-Lite kicked off in 1982, when Youngstown, Ohio-born textiles designer Kierin Magenta Kirby (eventually Lady Miss Kier) met Ukrainian émigré Dmitry Brill (Supa DJ Dmitry) in Washington Square Park, among the NYU students, strung-out gutter hypes, and guys selling fake weed. They soon entered a romantic relationship that lasted some 13 years. Dmitry had taken piano lessons back home in the former U.S.S.R. and moved to New York in 1979 at age 15. Clubland lured him and he DJed at places like the Pyramid, the Red Zone, and Nell’s. Kier would go-go dance at parties thrown by nightlife legend Susanne Bartsch and work the coat check at Limelight (she claimed to have been fired for blowing her nose on someone’s fur coat).
The third Deee-Lite member, the Korean Japanese producer Towa Tei, didn’t move to New York until 1987, the year after Deee-Lite officially formed. After he arrived from Japan, Towa started hanging out at Afrochine and, one night, he passed a DJ tape he’d made to Dmitry, who was spinning at the club. Kier credited Towa for blessing the group with its “techno” side. “We were all going to schools at some point, but we all dropped out and I guess we got hooked up in the club scene because it was fun,” she said. New York stories don’t get more classic than that.
Deee-Lite honed their sound against the commercial rise of house music. Starting in the ’80s, major labels kept their eyes on Europe and snatched up acts that hit there—even American ones. After Steve “Silk” Hurley’s “Jack Your Body” became the first house song to hit No. 1 in the UK in 1987, his J.M. Silk project signed to RCA. To Select, Kier acknowledged how the success of Technotronic and Soul II Soul opened doors for her group, explaining, “If it wasn’t for them getting in the pop charts we wouldn’t have got anywhere.” Early on, Deee-Lite sent out a demo to every major label, according to Details. The only response was from a label calling it “completely unoriginal.” A few years later, during the dance-pop frenzy, they caused a bidding war. They eventually signed a reported seven-album deal with Elektra.
Deee-Lite were the rare self-produced early ’90s dance pop act with a vision. They imagined the vibes and connectedness of a good party on a global scale, preaching unity and peace on their first album and then wading into specifics like the broken judicial system, safe sex in the time of AIDS, and environmental collapse on their second, 1992’s Infinity Within. The group plausibly claimed it had “total creative control” in a 1991 interview with Keyboard. Their messaging was intentionally simplistic—Kier told Select that they crafted their lyrics so 5 year olds could understand them. “It’s really easy to over-intellectualize things, to satisfy your ego by certain words, but it doesn’t go right with the age of communication,” said the frontwoman.
After “Groove” became one of the defining singles of the ’90s, Deee-Lite enjoyed “it” status. They played SNL and performed in front of the massive crowd at Rock and Rio II. They were on the covers of magazines like Spin and Paper. They walked Thierry Mugler’s runway. The group’s first album, World Clique, went gold (as did “Groove”) and spawned two additional No. 1s on Billboard’s Club Play chart, “Power of Love” and “Good Beat.” But ubiquity had a downside, especially in the early ’90s when selling out was a thing that the self-consciously cool deliberately avoided. “The fame quickly turned to shame because all of a sudden, we felt like we were in the same category with what we always detested, which is overexposed, force-fed. We didn’t ask anyone to play our song 13 times a day,” Kier told Project X in 1994.
“Groove” threatened to swallow what the rest of Deee-Lite was about, including their wide-ranging sound (funk icons Bootsy Collins, Maceo Parker, and Fred Wesley played on the group’s first two albums and toured with them). Infinity Within not only built on World Clique’s socially aware ethos but became more inward-looking and specific in its politics. It also presented a new look for the band that dipped further back in time to the visual aesthetic of the 1950s. Kier wore beatnik stripes and a beret in promo shots and posed like a pinup on the album’s cover. Deee-Lite were doing eras before people were calling them eras.
And then, for 1994’s Dewdrops in the Garden, another pivot. “As much as I liked the last album, it was a little over-produced and a little too slick,” Kier told Mixmag. Infinity Within had bangers, but a few of its housey numbers sported the kind of muted bass that tends to suggest music for radio and not the club. The low end on Dewdrops, though, was robust, at times gurgling. This was an album made for the club. Kier told Mixmag that a lot of the songs were written “literally on the dance floor.” She explained, ”If something came to me, I made sure I brought a Walkman and would really feel the crowd and write right there, down there in the DJ booth writing some hook.” Dmitry, meanwhile, played Dewdrops drafts while DJing and modified the songs based on the crowds’ reactions.
On Dewdrops, Deee-Lite took their cues from rave culture, and the techno and breakbeat hardcore influences meant a tougher, sometimes acidic sound. It was still housey in parts, but icier—more Slam than Tony Humphries. The group once again revamped their look, with Kier rocking pigtails and sportier duds. Without the big hair and over-the-top vintage attire of their first two albums, the considerable and repeatedly acknowledged influence of Kier’s drag queen peers fell to the wayside during the Dewdrops era. She explained, “People are dancing for 10 hours straight, including me, so you’re dressing more for the dance floor, for the long stretch, you know? If you’re going to a three-day rave in the mountains, you want to be comfortable.”
Kier’s then-recent travels found her not just at mountain raves, but in the Hopi ruins and amid the pyramids of the Yucatan. The psychedelia on Dewdrops is more explicit than ever—“Music Selector Is the Soul Reflector” integrates a recording by Timothy Leary and there’s a song called “DMT” (short for “Dance Music Trance”—sure, Jan). In opener “Say Ahhh…” she raps about “Rolling Phillies, acting silly.” The group had long been open about their drug use, and in a 2006 interview, Kier attributed her vocal training to LSD. In addition to good vibes, the drugs also had Deee-Lite dropping out… at least of the kind of specific political commentary that partly defined their previous album. Lyrically, Dewdrops was “more about personal politics rather than global,” according to a Kier quote in its press release. It continues: “We’re going back to our original concept… People have enough problems, they don't have to hear it in music. Just making uplifting music is a political statement in itself.”
Tenuous as that reasoning may have been, it’s certainly true that Dewdrops’ tracks mostly focus on matters of the heart and feet. Roughly half of the album is dance cuts, and the other half is midtempo, hip-hop inflected material, complete with rapping from Kier, whose relaxed flow avoids try-hard affect and casts her as a missing link between Queen Latifah at her most laid-back and Kitty Pryde. There’s also scratching from new member DJ Ani (Ani Q. Schempf), who filled in for Towa Tei while he was away making his solo debut, Future Listening! The midtempos skew horny—three songs discuss petting in various intensities (“Say Ahh…,” “Apple Juice Kissing,” and the perfectly titled “Stay in Bed, Forget the Rest”), but even “Picnic in the Summertime,” an ode to “watching people have a good time” in a city park, contains the killer couplet: “Come at me like a panther/’Cause you know yes is my answer.”
Interspersed among these odes to interpersonal connection are what appear to be breakup songs. Deee-Lite had released breakup songs before, but “Bittersweet Loving” and “Somebody” seemed to speak to something immediate. According to Mixmag, Kier and Dmitry split in 1993, resulting in palpable tension: “At the photo session, Kier is asked to put her head on Dmitry’s stomach, and she hesitates.” In 2006, though, the Sydney Morning Herald printed that they’d actually split in 1995, after Dewdrops had run its course, and quoted Kier as saying, “When Dmitry and I split up, that was the end of the band. It was sad because I loved the band. I didn’t want to leave the band and the music and I missed my writing partner, but we couldn’t get along.” Perhaps they were on-again-off-again for a while. People can be as hard to quit as cigarettes.
Deee-Lite assembled Dewdrops using trusted musical tools, but they’d been sharpened. Since the beginning, Deee-Lite had espoused the virtues of sampling, but Dewdrops is a veritable shrine to the craft. There’s even an interlude, “Sampladelic,” that acknowledges this ethos. Sources vary from Earth, Wind & Fire to industrial band Die Warzau to hip-hop-adjacent dancehall toaster Super Cat to the Monkees. It’s a veritable crate-digger’s smorgasbord. Some songs are patchworks—“Apple Juice Kissing” borrows the groove of the Clash’s “Armagideon Time,” the lead guitar from Jamaican dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson’s “Loraine,” and drums from the Detroit Emeralds’ “You're Getting a Little Too Smart” (a classic break that’s been sampled hundreds of times). “Party Happening People” swivels between swing house (à la “Horny” by Cajmere, aka Green Velvet) and an Amen break (though not at jungle velocity—it was still early). “DMT” speeds up the break from Kool & the Gang’s “N.T.”
The vintage textures, particularly on the dance tracks, help distinguish the material from the group’s contemporaries and yet situate it within a larger musical history. It’s effective thrifting. Deee-Lite often discussed their fealty to style over fashion (“Fashion is something you buy, style is something you acquire,” said Dmitry) and they applied this principle to music as well as visual aesthetics. It’s the concert of sensibilities and sources that made Deee-Lite stand out from the pack. “Call Me,” the only track that Towa worked on, incorporates the bleepy sound of landline dial tones. In the single, “Bring Me Your Love,” they reproduce the main draw of Lil Louis’ “French Kiss,” slowing down the track only to speed it back up. During re-liftoff, the disco string hits start flying like throwing stars and an album that is bubbling with energy unveils yet another way to zoom.
In general, the uptempos avoid traditional structures—the approach to songwriting is track-y, which is to say that rarely do eight bars go by without a change, and rarely are these changes anything less than catchy as fuck. Dewdrops’ songs are at times chains of hooks. “Bittersweet Loving” has seven distinct motifs that thrive on repetition. Kier’s innate musicality is on full display in her vocal performance: A single word, “bittersweet,” becomes an earworm as she octave-hops its delivery. Elsewhere, she’ll spit out a word (“Freedom!”) only to then really sink her teeth into it (“Free-duh-huh-uh-hum”). She sounds utterly inspired even when a track’s lyrics in full are: “Get with the party happening people… Feel the flow are you feeling it? Yes I’m feeling it.”
Dewdrops contained no indication Deee-Lite were anywhere near slowing down. It’s full of life and packs in more joy than any previous Deee-Lite release. While it has its share of lyrical relics that make it unmistakably ’90s (subway tokens, eschewing cell phones, the condom code), its overall sound hasn’t aged much. It benefits from a kind of stasis that set into dance music not long after it was released.
In the years leading up to Dewdrops, technological advances were spawning new subgenres seemingly every few months. Innovation didn’t evaporate after, but some of those now calcified dance music styles more or less function as they have for decades. A vocal jungle track or disco house song has become simply a musical form, as reliable as a folk song, power ballad, or punk ripper. Time-blindness allows something like “Call Me” to sound at home in a contemporary set. Deee-Lite’s left-leaning politics, psychedelic rhapsodizing, and club cultural reporting only strengthen the relevance of Dewdrops.
After Deee-Lite disbanded, Kier and Towa pursued solo projects and collaborations, while Dmitry and Ani kept DJing; Kier launched her own DJ career. In 1996, Elektra released a compilation of vintage and previously unreleased remixes, Sampladelic Relics and Dancefloor Oddities; The Very Best of Deee-Lite followed in 2001. In 2006, Kier said that a Deee-Lite reunion would “never happen, ever.” She declined to elaborate in detail, saying, “Well, that is a long, vicious story filled with heartache. I don’t think anyone’s ready for that story.” In retrospect, the career of Deee-Lite is a showcase of smiles frozen in time and hope for a better future that never arrived. Deee-Lite’s ebullient third album, 31 years later, is wrapped in the poignancy of inadvertent swan song. It was their last party, and no one knew. Bittersweet loving, indeed.
