Some people discover their favourite songs through a cool older sibling, a late-night radio DJ or a lovingly curated mixtape. I discovered one of mine through a free ticket to a spring-break reality movie that roughly ten people turned up to see. Stay for the credits, kids. Sometimes they're the best part. Sometimes they're the only good part.
The Most Exclusive Screening of 2003
Picture it: 2003. I'm a university film student, which means I take cinema very seriously and own at least one opinion about Kubrick I haven't earned yet. Through my filmmaking class, I somehow win preview tickets to a new release. A free movie is a free movie, so I go.
The movie is The Real Cancun.
I walk in and count the crowd. There might have been ten of us. It had the atmosphere of a very dimly lit waiting room, and in fairness, we were all waiting for something. I just didn't know yet that it would arrive after the film finished.
The Real Cancun, Briefly (Sadly, It Was Not Brief)
For the blessedly unaware: The Real Cancun was a feature-length reality film from Bunim/Murray, the producers behind MTV's The Real World. The concept was their TV formula, stretched to cinema length: sixteen young Americans, one spring break in Cancun's Hotel Zone, cameras rolling as they drank, flirted, fought and made choices.
The turnaround was frankly heroic. Filming ran from March 13 to 23, 2003, and it was in American cinemas by April 25. Six weeks from tequila to multiplex. Unfortunately, speed was about the only thing anyone praised. Critics hated it, and it made around US$5.3 million worldwide against a US$7.5 million budget. It flopped so convincingly that Universal pulled its own spring-break reality film, The Quest, from its planned release to rethink things.
Fun fact for my fellow Australians: we accounted for nearly a million dollars of that worldwide take when it opened here in July 2003. As a nation, we showed up. Collectively, at least.
Then the Credits Rolled
So the film ends. The lights stay down. And over the credits comes this swaggering, fuzzed-out, funk-rock strut with a chorus that sounds like it was engineered in a lab to be shouted out of a car window. I remember sitting there thinking: who on earth is this, and why is it attached to this?
It was "Fever for the Flava" by Hot Action Cop.
Hot Action Cop was a rock band fronted by singer, guitarist and songwriter Rob Werthner. Their self-titled debut album came out on Lava/Atlantic on March 4, 2003, produced by Michael Baker, with the single recorded in Nashville. The sound sat somewhere in the nu-metal, funk-metal and rap-rock overlap that owned the early 2000s: big riffs, bigger grooves and a sense of humour about itself.
Best bit of trivia: the title hook was lifted from a 1980 Pringles ad. A snack-food jingle, reborn as a rock chorus. Honestly, that's the most 2003 sentence I've ever typed.
It was a modest hit in the US, reaching the high 30s on Billboard's alternative and mainstream rock charts, and number 41 in the UK. But it did especially well here, landing in the ARIA year-end top 100 for 2003. So if you're Australian and this song is burned into your brain, you're not alone. You're statistically normal.
It Was Everywhere, If You Knew Where to Look
Once you'd heard it, you started noticing it. "Fever for the Flava" turned up in American Wedding, The Hot Chick and Grind, and in episodes of King of the Hill, Malcolm in the Middle, Smallville and Boston Legal. A clean version also appeared in Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2, with the lyrics rewritten around street racing so the game could keep its E rating. Which is how a whole generation of teenagers learned the family-friendly version first and got a genuine shock later.
The band put in the hard yards too, touring the US, Canada, Germany and England between late 2002 and the end of 2003, supporting acts like Evanescence and Trapt and playing the northwest leg of Lollapalooza 2003. Werthner also wrote the theme song for the 2003 film S.W.A.T. Busy year for the man.
Why It Stuck
Here's what I love about this story. The film was designed by committee to capture a cultural moment, and it evaporated almost instantly. The song was a band having fun with a riff and a potato-chip slogan, and more than twenty years later it still makes me turn the volume up.
That's the whole crate-digging philosophy, really. Great music hides in strange places: the B-side, the bargain bin, the end credits of a movie ten people watched. You can't plan those discoveries. You just have to be the person who stays in their seat when the lights are still down.
Wear the Glow
If you've got the fever too, our Green Glow Tee is built for late nights, loud stereos and a bit of neon under the chassis. No spring break required.
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