Admittedly, the first few times I heard Stage's booty-shaking dance hit "Ocean Of Crime", it was in "da clubz" so I wasn't immediately concerned if there was a video for the song or not. All I knew was that the whole place seemed to levitate when the DJ spun this track.
In that sense, the song epitomized the best part of Chicago House music: you never knew from when or where the song you were currently losing your mind to was coming from because, by and large, the best house DJ's knew no bounds. If it got the joint jumping, anything was fair game so you could just as easily be hearing an obscure '70s disco nugget seamlessly mixed with the latest spacey dance hit from Italy.
For twenty years, I'd been pulling out this slab of wax and wondering why the band's faces were not shown on the otherwise completely rad cover art. Soonafter, I saw the video for the first time and immediately knew why.
Thing is, it almost seems as if German duo Prime Time took one look at Stage's video for the song and immediately knew what they had to do: film a music video that is every bit as bad as, if not worse than, Stage's video!
Even after blowing through all of the post-production bells and whistles available to them at the time in their first video for the song, singer Ralf Roder must have thought a simpler, more straight-ahead performance video was also in order.
WINNER: The end result is that we music video fans of the future are the real winners of this race to the bottom of the top. Since neither the members of Stage or Prime Time could be located in order to accept the award, we are left with no other alternative than to call this one a tie!