The first time I heard Lambada, I found it an utterly delightful piece. It was like a cream-filled profiterole: soft, sweet, engaging. Try eating a profiterole (for the purists: profiterol) a day for months on end, and it will inevitably become cloying. The sugar spikes from this song, over the following months, became unbearable. By early 1990, just hearing this song—which by then had been adapted for everything, including ads for wholesale ceramic retailers on a state road—provoked a fair amount of disgust. In the end, the Kaoma, who claimed they didn’t have the authorization to record a song originally written by another group, lost the lawsuit, and soon after, Lambada vanished from our collective imagination. Yet for several months, it truly seemed like we would be eating cream-filled profiteroles for the rest of our lives; a sort of episode from The Twilight Zone.
Kjarkas - Llorando Se Fue (1981)