“Wild Thing” by Tone Loc

"Wild Thing" was the lead single from Tone Lōc's debut album, Lōc-ed After Dark, on Delicious Vinyl, and its title borrows a well-worn bit of slang for sex. The spark came from the movies: producer Michael Ross heard Fab 5 Freddy toss off the phrase in Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It, and he handed the job of writing the rhymes to Young MC. Ross and Matt Dike produced it, Mario Caldato Jr. engineered, and Lōc supplied the lazy, lady-killer delivery that sold it.

It's a loose, cocky strut of a record, rock crunch under a rap that sounds half-amused at itself. It climbed to number two on the Hot 100 in February 1989, topped the New Zealand chart for two weeks that April and sold more than two million copies in the States. "Weird Al" Yankovic paid it the compliment of a Gilligan's Island parody, "Isle Thing", his first crack at rap.

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