Whoomp! (There It Was)

Robert Sanchez: Steve Rolln was on the line with his man DC the Brain Supreme. DC had been talking to three strippers—Cinnamon, Chocolate, and Dark-N-Lovely—who'd just gotten back from Miami and had told DC, who was a strip-club DJ, about a chant that had gone viral in the South Florida clubs: "Whoomp! There it is." It was difficult to decipher at first; the refrain was so guttural, so dirty. Was it "whoop" or "whoops" or "woot"? No, no, no. It was whoomp, a bit of ingenious, onomatopoeic strip-club slang to which someone had appended the phrase "there it is." A woman takes it all off, and—Whoomp! There it is. DC was on it. He wanted to take those four words, wrap a beat around them, and make a song. A party song. The party song.

"Yeah, but how do you spell 'whoomp'?" Steve asked his best friend—the kid he'd grown up with in Denver in the early '80s, the guy he'd brought to Atlanta all those years later with the dream they'd someday hit it big in the hip-hop game. They'd had to move to the South; Denver didn't have what they needed to make it.

Atlanta, on the other hand, was the perfect place for these two young rappers. It was the summer of 1992; Bobby Brown, who had made Atlanta his adopted home, was a growing presence at the top of the R&B charts. Record executive L.A. Reid was churning out hits with an all-star list of African-American talent. Now, four years after the release of N.W.A's Straight Outta Compton; three years after the Beastie Boys reimagined hip-hop with Paul's Boutique; and one year after Ice-T's O.G. Original Gangster, DC and Steve—together known as Tag Team—were ready. They didn't, however, want to compete with those artists. What they wanted to do was much more pedestrian, but no less ambitious: They would create a song with a shuffling high-hat rhythm and a bass line that you could feel in your bones, with lyrics about partying and fun and sex. If they did it right, it would drive people onto the dance floor. If they had a hit, it would play on a seemingly endless loop on MTV and VH1 and FM radio stations. It would show up in movies. People across the country would chant the chorus at clubs; fans at basketball games would shout "whoomp!" after spectacular dunks. And the two guys from Denver would be world-famous and, one day, become very, very rich.