Guess who just got back from Funkytown? I did, and it was fantastic! One minute I was in my car driving down Salem Church Road in insufferable Newark, Delaware and the next I was stepping aboard the Love Train on Electric Avenue in mid-town Funkytown passing Studio 54s left and right and Mick and Bianca and Andy and Elton and Cher were on the train and high above Funkytown I could see a disco inferno blazing atop Disco Mountain like a giant disco ball, and what a disco they must have up there, I thought! And I looked down at my feet and I was wearing boogie shoes!
It was an amazing thing to happen, and it can happen to you too. All you have to do is turn on Lipps Inc.’s late-stage (1980) disco classic “Funkytown,” one of the greatest bursts of dance floor ecstasy of the pre-ecstasy era. Only several things need be said about “Funkytown,” because everything you really need to know about it is coming to you through your ears, but the most important (and I’ll return to this soon) is that it’s a robotic synthpop/disco synthesis with a solid four-on-the-floor basstastic beat that was as revolutionary as it was impossible not to bump Bertha Butts to.
But first a brief history. The song (and Lipps Inc.) were the brainchildren of Steven Phillip Greenberg, a wannabe-musical Svengali/party and wedding DJ from St. Paul, Minnesota who scored a regional hit with “Rock It,” which scored him a deal with legendary Casablanca Records. Lipps Inc. weren’t even a band yet, so Greenberg gathered up some sessions players (guitarists David Rivkin and Tom Riopelle, keyboardist Ivan Rafowitz, synth and vocoder programmer Roger Dumas, and bassist Terry Grant), then snatched lead vocalist (and saxophonist) Cynthia Johnson from a band (Flyte Tyme) that would soon become Prince side-project The Time.
Oh, and a curious historical factoid: several videos of “Funkytown” were made, and Johnson didn’t appear in any of them until the one produced in 2012! One features Doris D., the slinky and very Caucasian New Wave-looking English ringer who fronted the band in the Netherlands and West Germany, which just goes to show you how much stock Greenberg put in artistic integrity. But I don’t care. Artistic integrity can bite me! Milli Vanilli was framed! I just want to know why poor Cynthia got the shaft! Was she hideous, you’re asking yourself? No! She was Miss Black Minnesota the year I graduated from high school, for Christ’s sake!
But as everybody knows showbiz is a tour through the sewer in a glass-bottom boat, so whatcha gonna do? What matters is that the minute “Funkytown” hit the airwaves people threw away their punk and prog and pub rock and blues and New Wave albums because they didn’t need them anymore! I have a picture-perfect memory of tossing my Roxy Music albums in the trash, with the words, “You ain’t Funkytown, you just smell funky!” I’m not going to tell you it’s my FAVORITE disco song: “Disco Inferno,” “Stayin’ Alive,” “Get Down Tonight,” “Rock the Boat,” “You Sexy Thing,” and even George McCrae’s “Rock Your Baby” cut it. At least on most days. Because there are days when “Funkytown” is the only place I want to go!
Evidently the Big Apple was the funky town where Cynthia wanted to be, but I like to think of Funkytown as a kind of superhip conglomeration of NYC, New Orleans at Mardi Gras, Pottersville, the Black Hole of Calcutta, and Philadelphia’s Fishtown in the late eighties. No, forget that. To me Funkytown is a gimungous disco as large as a city with its own microclimate (sweaty!) illuminated by a giant glittering and revolving disco ball so intensely hot you’d instantly be turned to ash if you got within ten football fields of it. And it would have streets and cars and bodegas and a YMCA (natch) and have I mentioned the giant cocaine pits?
But back to the song and what’s so great about it, which I can sum up quite neatly by saying it has as much Giorgio Moroder and Gary Numan in it as it does the Hues Corporation. Johnson’s vocorder-altered vocals in the intro, that brilliantly cheesy five-and-dime ten-note synthesizer line, the robotic backing vocalists chanting “won’t you take me to?,” that wonderful G. Moroder Euro-disco beat—I’ve read that Greenberg worshiped Kraftwerk, so is it any wonder the song is as sleek, mechanized, and inhuman as your average German? Except for that out-of-control cowbell—it’s no machine! And then there are the beep beeps of imaginary traffic and that one-finger synth line and that great descending and ascending bass line and the guitars that play that simple riff and the synthesized strings—and let’s not forget the saxophone that sounds like it’s being played by a foundry.
All of which are likely to dissolve upon hearing into the fatty deposits of your derriere if all you’re hearing is that disco beat, which was long the case with me—for years I can’t say I really thought of “Funkytown” as anything but a straight-up great disco song. It brings the funk! It brings the funk without the “k”! It’s dance floor delirium and has the momentum of a Love Train gone out of control, yet never steps out of that four-four beat! And then there are the cool parts where it’s just the percussion doing its no-deviation thing and the tension builds until Johnson comes back to remind you of where she wants YOU to take her to!
And what can I say about the ten notes that make up that synth line other than they’re totally dumb and brilliant at the same time? Which is the best combination in the whole wide world! And every time the guitars come in, I feel like a street-walkin’ cheetah with a heart full of napalm, and I don’t know why! Iggy was in Berlin at the time and never put out a disco song, although “Lust for Life” may as well be one, because that’s the whole disco ethos right there in the title! You’re hungry to live! To do a little dance, make a little love, get down tonight! To snort the total gross national cocaine product of the country of Bolivia in one long twisting Andean mountain road of a line! And it’s raining poppers along with men, and there go the Village People!
Look, I’m not joking. “Funkytown” is a dance floor monument as Mt. Rushmore-worthy as any Disco Mountain, as flaming hot, hot, hot as any Disco Inferno, as getdowntonightable as any bunch of Hialeah, Florida flamingo boys. It’s one of the greatest of songs from one of the greatest genres ever, even if I did want to burn disco records back in the day. But I was a stupid punk! Brainwashed! And deluded! Because what has punk ever given us in the dance-floor department, besides “Psycho Killer” (robotic disco at its best) and the great “Sex Bomb”?
Oh, and that Lipps Inc. is a pun on “lipsynch.” Like I said before: Milli Vanilli was framed!
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
