“Gypsy Woman (She's Homeless)” by Crystal Waters

Crystal Waters arrived in April 1991 with "Gypsy Woman (She's Homeless)", the lead single from her debut album Surprise on Mercury. She wrote it with Neal Conway, the Basement Boys produced it, and the whole thing hangs on two hooks: a nagging keyboard riff and a nonsense-syllable vocal refrain. The song also goes by "Gypsy Woman (La Da Dee La Da Da)".

This is house music boiled down to pure hypnosis, and it ran up charts across Europe and America: number 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number one in Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland, plus the Eurochart Hot 100. Mark Pellington directed the video. Remixers have kept going back to it, and Slant, Rolling Stone and Billboard have since ranked it among the greatest dance songs ever made.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.