The 1990s File Feature
I Like It
"I Like It" — Jomanda's House Gospel Moment on the 1993 Hot 100 Club Heat, Summer 1993 The summer of 1993 was a generous one for dance music on American radi…
01 The Story
"I Like It" — Jomanda's House Gospel Moment on the 1993 Hot 100
Club Heat, Summer 1993
The summer of 1993 was a generous one for dance music on American radio and in American clubs. House, garage, and R&B-inflected dance tracks were finding new crossover audiences as urban radio stations pushed into mainstream chart territory and club culture continued its steady migration from underground scenes into the pop mainstream. Into that context stepped Jomanda, a New Jersey-based vocal trio whose sound sat squarely at the intersection of house music's rhythmic architecture and gospel-influenced soul vocals. I Like It arrived in the summer of 1993 and captured something of the euphoric, communal energy that defined the best dance music of the period.
Jomanda had been recording since the late 1980s and had developed a following in the dance music community well before breaking through to mainstream chart recognition. The group, centered on the powerful lead vocals of Joanne Thomas, built their reputation in the New York metropolitan area's club scene, a world that prized vocal authenticity and groove architecture in equal measure. They had scored previous R&B and dance chart success, establishing them as a reliable presence in the genre before their biggest Hot 100 crossover moments.
The Sound and Its Roots
The production aesthetic of I Like It reflects the club-oriented house and garage sound that had flourished in New York and New Jersey throughout the late 1980s and into the 1990s. The genre owed enormous debts to gospel vocal tradition, and Jomanda embodied that connection more completely than most of their contemporaries. Thomas's vocal delivery carried the kind of fervent intensity associated with church singing, transporting a fundamentally secular lyrical message into a register that felt spiritually charged.
This combination, the rhythmic framework of house music with the emotional depth of gospel-influenced vocals, was one of the defining sounds of the era's underground club culture. Acts like Jomanda helped push that sound closer to mainstream acceptance, creating records that worked in the club at two in the morning and on drive-time radio at eight in the morning with equal effectiveness. The production built around the vocals kept the groove tight while giving the voice room to breathe and soar.
Chart Presence and Hot 100 Performance
The single debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on July 10, 1993, entering at position 83. That opening position was also the track's peak, which reflects a pattern common in the early 1990s Hot 100 landscape where dance and club-oriented records could enter the chart at their ceiling based on early radio and retail strength, then gradually descend as mainstream pop rotations moved on to newer arrivals. The record spent six weeks on the chart, with its presence reflecting genuine traction in the dance and urban markets rather than a brief pop crossover flash.
The Hot 100 in mid-1993 was crowded with material from across the genre spectrum. Whitney Houston's soundtrack work, Mariah Carey's continuing commercial dominance, and the ongoing strength of hip-hop acts were all competing for the same chart real estate. For a dance act with a strong club following but limited mainstream pop infrastructure, charting at all represented a meaningful achievement in that environment.
Jomanda in the Dance Music Ecosystem
The trio had recorded for Big Beat Records and had connections to the network of producers and remixers who built the New York dance music infrastructure in the late 1980s and early 1990s. That ecosystem was responsible for some of the most inventive production work of the period, and Jomanda's catalog benefited from association with it. The group's ability to generate both club play and radio traction made them a valued asset in a scene where those two markets did not always overlap cleanly.
Their longevity in the dance music scene through multiple stylistic transitions is one of the more underappreciated aspects of their career. Many acts from the New Jersey house and garage scene of the late 1980s found themselves stranded when the market shifted, but Jomanda continued recording and performing through the 1990s, maintaining their core following even as mainstream tastes evolved around them.
A Snapshot of Dance Pop at a Specific Moment
Placed in historical context, I Like It serves as an excellent document of where dance music was in the summer of 1993: enthusiastic, gospel-inflected, built for communal spaces where the shared physical experience of the groove was the point. The record captures a specific and vital current in American pop music that would go on to influence the production aesthetic of mainstream R&B for years to come.
Find a good speaker system and let that groove do what it was designed to do.
"I Like It" — Jomanda's singular moment on the 1990s charts.
02 Song Meaning
"I Like It" — Jomanda and the Spiritual Dimension of Dance Floor Joy
The Gospel of Good Feeling
Dance music has always had a complicated relationship with the sacred. The beats, the communal movement, the cathartic release of tension through physical response to sound: these are experiences that overlap in significant ways with what people have historically sought in religious gathering. Jomanda's I Like It makes that connection explicit through its vocal approach. Joanne Thomas's delivery brings the fervor and physical commitment of gospel singing to a lyrical terrain that is essentially about pleasure, affirmation, and shared enjoyment. The combination gives the track an emotional depth that purely secular dance music sometimes lacks.
Affirmation as Theme
The song's central emotional project is affirmation. The lyrical content focuses on positive feeling, on saying yes to life, to music, to the moment. In the context of early 1990s America, with its grinding anxieties about economic inequality, urban crisis, and the ongoing devastation of the AIDS epidemic in the communities where house music had its deepest roots, that affirmative stance carried meaning beyond its surface simplicity. Songs that created space for joy and celebration in communities under sustained pressure were doing real cultural work.
The house and garage music scene that Jomanda emerged from was significantly shaped by LGBTQ communities, particularly Black and Latino gay communities in New York and New Jersey, for whom the dance floor was a crucial space of sanctuary and self-expression. The affirmative energy of tracks like this one reflected and served those communities, offering something that went beyond entertainment into the territory of emotional sustenance.
Gospel Vocal Tradition Meets Club Architecture
The marriage of gospel vocal technique and electronic dance production that defines Jomanda's sound was not unique to them, but they executed it with particular conviction. The gospel tradition prioritizes vocal authenticity, the sense that what the singer is expressing is genuinely felt rather than technically performed. That quality of conviction is what separates truly moving dance music from competent but emotionally hollow production.
The "I Like It" approach to its material demonstrates this principle clearly. The pleasure and affirmation expressed in the song sound lived-in and real, not performed. The groove provides the physical dimension and the vocals provide the emotional one, and the combination is what makes the track function as well in headphone listening as on a club sound system at high volume.
Legacy and Cultural Placement
Jomanda's work, including this single, occupies an interesting position in the history of American dance music. The group represents a specific and important bridge between the underground house and garage scenes of the late 1980s and the mainstream crossover that transformed dance music's commercial status in the early-to-mid 1990s. Their ability to maintain gospel vocal authenticity while working within contemporary production frameworks was both an artistic achievement and a commercial strategy.
The six-week run on the Billboard Hot 100 represents the mainstream's recognition of what the club scene already knew. The track's emotional content, stripped of any specific topical hook or provocative statement, simply communicated genuine human pleasure and invited listeners to share it. That turned out to be enough, as it almost always does when executed with sufficient conviction and craft.
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