Jump Around by House of Pain

Jump Around is a 1992 hip hop single by House of Pain, the Los Angeles trio of Everlast, Danny Boy and DJ Lethal. DJ Muggs of Cypress Hill produced it, and Everlast wrote the words. Tommy Boy and XL released it on May 5, 1992, as the first single from the group's debut album, House of Pain (Fine Malt Lyrics). It reached number three on the Billboard Hot 100, went platinum in the United States, and later became a fixture at sports events.

Muggs first built the beat for Cypress Hill's second album, but B-Real never found lyrics that fit. An early version had Son Doobie of Funkdoobiest rapping over it, and Muggs also played the track for Ice Cube, who passed. Muggs then gave it to Everlast.

Everlast has said he wrote the lyrics sitting in Muggs' driveway in Bell Gardens. His first draft leaned on dancehall, with a longer chorus about loving freedom and culture. Muggs told him to cut the chorus down to the two words of the title. Muggs dug up the horn sample while Everlast was still writing. The group put the track together at Muggs' house in November 1991, then moved it onto 24 tracks at Image Recording. Everlast has said the session felt like a party and that the original demo is close to what ended up on the record.

Danny Boy did not write any of the song, and he has said that means he does not collect its songwriting royalties. His job in the group was design. He drew the House of Pain logo, and Tommy Boy president Monica Lynch noticed it on the demo tapes before she signed them.

The record opens with a horn fanfare lifted from Harlem Shuffle, the 1963 single by Bob & Earl, and it also borrows from Popeye the Hitchhiker by Chubby Checker. A squeal cuts in at the start of almost every bar, 66 times in all, and listeners have argued for years about where it came from. Questlove and the writer Anil Dash heard Prince's Gett Off in it. WhoSampled listed Shoot Your Shot by Junior Walker and the All Stars, and in 2016 a reader of Newsweek ran a spectrogram that matched the squeal more closely to that track. Everlast told Questlove it was a horn, not Prince, and Prince never weighed in. In 2020 Everlast said the sound came from Ain't Sayin' Nothin' by Divine Styler, a record that itself samples Shoot Your Shot.

The label had flown the group to New York to shoot a video for another song, Come and Get Some of This, at a former club in the Meatpacking District. Partway through the first day, the plan changed to Jump Around, and the group stayed in town for about a week so they could film at the 1992 St. Patrick's Day parade. The final cut also uses footage from Central Park and the Old Town Bar and Restaurant, and Yankees superfan Freddy Schuman shows up in the crowd banging his shamrock pan. The video closes with a dedication to Matt Champy, a friend of the band who died that year.

In the United States the single went to number three on both the Billboard Hot 100 and the Cash Box Top 100, number five on the Hot Rap Singles chart, and number one on Maxi-Singles Sales. It finished 1992 at number 24 on the Billboard year-end chart. It reached number nine in Ireland, number ten in the Netherlands and number 15 in Australia. The first British release in September 1992 stalled at number 32. XL put it out again in May 1993, and that time it climbed to number eight. The song has since been certified double platinum in the UK, four times platinum in New Zealand, and gold in Germany, Denmark and Australia. Everlast has described the first time he heard it in a New York club, when the crowd already knew every word and the floor seemed to shake.

Critics liked it from the start. NME put it at number six on its singles of the year list for 1992 and later ranked it among the best songs of the 1990s. VH1 placed it at number 24 on its list of the greatest songs of the 90s, and in 2024 Billboard put it at number eight on a list of the greatest jock jams ever.

At the University of Wisconsin, the stadium plays it between the third and fourth quarters of every home football game, and the whole student section jumps. The tradition took hold at the 1998 homecoming game against Purdue, after a marketing intern who was also an injured tight end saw how a Madison bar reacted to the song. In 2003 the school briefly stopped it over worries about the stands shaking, then brought it back days later once engineers said Camp Randall Stadium could take the strain. Darts champion Gary Anderson walks on to it, and the wrestling team PG-13 used a clean edit as entrance music.

Everlast has said he was proudest of the song's spot in Mrs. Doubtfire, which brought it to a younger crowd who later turned up at House of Pain shows. It also plays over the highlights in Happy Gilmore and returns in Happy Gilmore 2. He was less pleased when the label licensed it for a Pringles ad, and he got that pulled after about two weeks. KSI released a version with Waka Flocka Flame in 2016, and the band Coming for Blood recorded a nu metal cover with DJ Lethal in 2019. At the 2018 Grammys, Bruno Mars worked the song into a dance routine alongside Gett Off, a nod to the old squeal debate.

For DJs who want to mix it, the track's tempo and key are listed on the Jump Around key and BPM page.