Let’s start with a disclaimer: I am painfully aware that there is nothing less interesting in the world than reading about 90s nostalgia. It’s needless, pointless, reductive, and, let’s be honest, really fucking boring. I’d rather read about economic patterns in 16th century Spain, or a PhD paper on emojis, or literally anything other than another empty-headed drone that mistakes easily accessible points of reference for insight. So, please, please accept this paragraph as an apology for what’s to follow. Well, for some of it anyway.
If you were a 90s kid—which I, as a 90s kid, assume everyone in the world is, regardless of their actual age, because deep down, aren’t we all, really, at heart, 90s kids?—then you’ll definitely remember the iconic 90s figure I’m going to write about because this guy is the 90s, and every 90s kid will definitely have strong, visceral memories of him because without him it’s arguable that the 90s just wouldn’t have been the same and we’d be very different 90s kids to the 90s kids we grew up to be. That man, that mythic figure, that fucking hero, that absolute fucking legend, that total fucking heroic leg-end, mate, is the one and only Alfonso Ribeiro.
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Every 90s kid out there, knows Alfonso as Carlton Banks. Carlton Banks was Will Smith’s straight-laced cousin in The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and, well, he was just fucking hilarious. The joke —and I’m not sure that I actually need to explain the joke behind the character of Carlton Banks to you in 2015, but hey, here we go—was that he wore big wooly jumpers and liked Tom Jones and was a clever clogs. Funny, right? Truly side-splitting stuff. To his credit, Riberio turned a character sketch into something approaching fleshed out during the duration of the show. Carlton was always more likeable than his brash cousin, always more human even when the character he was playing seemed to hover slightly away from the realm of traditionally accepted societal norms. And he had a funny dance, too, which was just hilarious. Dancing in sitcoms is never not absolutely fucking funny as fuck.
Before he was 90s kid icon Carlton Banks, Alfonso Ribeiro was just plain old Alfonso Ribeiro. But Alfonso Ribeiro wasn’t just any sadsack who didn’t play 90s kid icon Carlton Banks. He was child star Alfonso Ribeiro. Ribeiro rose to fame at the age of eight. When I was eight, I had a crippling, life-ruining fear of rain and a propensity to lie on the floor of my mum’s car on family days out. When he was eight he was smashing Broadway as the leading man in The Tap Dance Kid. He then appeared in a Pepsi advert alongside Michael Jackson. In that advert, Jackson is surrounded by a gang of pre-pubescent breakdancing lads who gamely chuff down bottles of the sickly sweet carbonated drink. Ribeiro plays an MJ Mini Me, moonwalking with gay abandon, while the full-sized Mike sings a fizzy-drink friendly version of “Billie Jean,” a song so good, so resolutely not-of-this-world that even changing the lyrics of the chorus to, “You’re the Pepsi generation/guzzle down and taste the thrill of the day,” has no majorly adverse consequences. Following its broadcast run, rumours abounded that claimed that Ribeiro—who undoubtedly outshines the King of Pop and really, really makes you want to go out and guzzle down the taste of the thrill of the day—had died as the result of breakdancing-induced neck-break during the filming.
He hadn’t died, obviously, which was great news for those of us who’d go onto be 90s kids who loved Carlton Banks. Instead, he kept on staying alive, popping up in a sitcom called Silver Spoons, and releasing a book about dancing called Alfonso’s Breakin’ and Poppin’ Book which is an essential read for the B-Boy in your life, and god knows we’ve all got one. So far so good for a bloke who hadn’t even thought about puberty yet.
When he wasn’t spinning on his head or drinking cans of cola with the most famous man on the planet, Ribeiro was in the studio creating a small but perfectly formed catalogue of incredible records. Yep, it’s true: Carlton Banks was the crown prince of funk. There was the lugubriously slow and steady, reggae-tinged cover of the Five Stairsteps’ “Ooh Child”, the razor sharp, tight and taut funk of “Not Too Young (To Fall in Love)” and his eerie, avant-garde early rap banger, “Time Bomb”, which genuinely sounds like the future, even now. Drop the dub next time you’ve got the warmup set in a Kingsland Road basement and watch the place fucking explode. Then there was his masterpiece, the magnum opus of Carlton Banks, a record that ranks up with with the best black dance music of the late 20th century: “Dance Baby.”
“Dance Baby” is a genuinely perfect record, in every way, and a song I don’t think I could ever tire of. As someone who’s life was changed in 2005 after hearing Chromeo’s Un Joli Mix Pour Toi for the first time, falling head over heels for the chewy, elasticated, yearning, sexiness of the post-disco, post-funk music known as boogie, hearing “Dance Baby” for the first time was an almost religious moment of transcendental ecstasy. There I was, thinking that Alfonso Ribeiro was just Carlton Banks, just Will Smith’s muscled comedic foil, just another product of the nostalgia machine, and the whole time I’d known him, which was, essentially, my entire conscious life, he’d made this! It was like finding out your weird great uncle had a Nobel stuffed down the sofa.
There’s something alarmingly adult about the Ribeiro oeuvre, and “Dance Baby” is no exception. There’s something beyond its years about the vocal performance—the grunts, the squeaks, cribbed from the Jackson playbook—which elevates it above child star curio into the boogie pantheon, nestling in with the likes of “I Didn’t Mean to Turn You On” by Cherelle, Temper’s “No Favours” and Barbara Roy’s incandescent “If You Want Me.” It’s a seriously sexy record made by…a child. Ahem. More than that, though, it’s perfect proof that everyone—bar, I don’t know, Adam Levine from Maroon 5 or Baron Adonis— has hidden depths. Even Carlton Banks.
For Ribeiro, life after Carlton’s been a mixed bag. He’s tried to shrug the character off. He’s presented game shows and appeared on Dancing with the Stars. He even popped up on The Graham Norton Show, and yep, he did the Carlton Dance and all the 90s kids in the crowd went wild. The last we saw of him on UK screens was a stint in the jungle, on I’m a Celebrity, where he crawled to a seventh-placed finish, telling Matthew Wright that he’d had “Enough of your fucking shit,” along the way. He did the dance, too. He’ll always be doing the dance, somewhere, for someone, but in his heart, and in mine, he’ll always be the boy responsible for recording one of the best records ever made. And for being Carlton Banks, obviously. I’m a 90s kid, after all.