Hyper! Hyper! Happy hardcore’s trip to the supermarket
German pop-cum-happy-hardcore outfit Scooter are somewhat of a divisive force in dance music – having been formed out of the ashes of new wave band Celebrate the Nun in the early 90s, their debut release, Hyper Hyper was an unexpected hit across Europe in 1993; in keeping with the Eurodance trend of the time.
But unlike fellow groups like Culture Beat and 2 Unlimited, Scooter have retained a loyal, if largely Teutonic following, with a string of releases over a 25-year career, including Behind the Cow, J’adore Hardcore and The Logical Song.
25 years. That’s around three times the career of The Beatles.
They are, in the unforgiving tones of Vice journalist Josh Baines, “clunky, brash and utterly artless. They’ve taken the Sunny Delight charms of happy hardcore’s endless sugar rushes and chucked a tonne of Saxo in the mix creating a kind of oddly unpalatable facsimile of something that was already relatively difficult to stomach in the first place”.
But it’s perhaps Scooter’s unyielding allure that led German retailer Edeka to approach the group’s frontman H.P. Baxxter to front arguably the oddest supermarket advert we’ve seen to date, back in 2015.
As the clip below demonstrates, Baxxter is disrupted from his daily shop by a group of piss-taking youths, before taking centre stage by yelling “How much is the fish?” (referencing the group’s 1998 ‘hit’) before the beats start pumping, lights are switched on and off, and some serious dad dancing takes place.
Berghain it ain’t. Still though… hyper hyper!
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