Tone Lōc – Funky Cold Medina
1989
254K Likes
Best comments
1.“You don't work with Jake Peralta for three years and not know what the Funky Cold Medina is.”
More comments
- 2.“I'm only watching this because Captain Holt said it. I regret nothing.”
- 3.“50 percent of comments remember this song back in the day. The other 50 percent are Brooklyn Nine-Nine fans.”
The story
Tone Lōc had a voice like a gravel road, and in 1989 it was everywhere. Funky Cold Medina was the second single from his debut Lōc-ed After Dark, right behind Wild Thing. It went to number three on the Billboard Hot 100 and platinum in the US, only the second rap single ever certified platinum. The first was Wild Thing. Young MC co-wrote it with producers Matt Dike and Michael Ross, and the beat is a crate-digger's buffet: a Funkadelic drum break, the guitar riff from Foreigner's Hot Blooded, plus pieces of Kiss, Free and the Rolling Stones.
The song is a comic tale about a love potion that backfires every way it can. Lōc tries it on his dog first, which goes about how you'd expect, and it only gets sillier from there until he swears off the stuff. The video plays it for laughs: some guy at the bar hogs all the women with a smoking green drink in an Absolut bottle, and Lōc takes the secret home to test on the pooch.
The phrase itself came from Flavor Flav, who used it on a Public Enemy record a year earlier and later told Lōc to build a song around it. Bartenders took the hint too. Several cocktails now carry the name.
