Also what happened in these cases is that the album is completed, or near completion, and the A&R guy decided that it would fail without that one song. You know the story: the band hates it, but if they want to keep their contract or have the album see the light of day, they record and release it. The song takes off, hit #1, the band hates it, but has to deal with it. The label wants a repeat, the band rebels, they get dropped. Or, they make a sequel (In this case, it's "Jimmy Loves Mary-Ann)", the song does moderately well, and the band gets dropped anyway.
Mystery solved! Yeah, the media constantly focuses on negatives that divide people. We need a better media.
I lost track of where his post was, but I was going to quote Sunspot42 and agree that "Word Up" is better than most of the sterile crap that has hit the top of the charts in 1986. Even though "Word Up" is '80s funk, which doesn't hold a candle to '70s funk, IMO.
Yeah, people do enough dividing on their own. We need to know what's going on out there, but don't need the media's help. By that, I mean the opinionated talking heads. It's the same thing. Parliament, Bar-Kays, The Brothers Johnson, Ramsey Lewis, The Isley Brothers, Earth, Wind & Fire, and others, were doing the exact, same kind of funk in the 70s.
'70s funk just seems more raw to me. I think it's the '80s production. A lot of '80s funk had that electro-funk thing going, too, which I think takes away from it. "Word Up" might even of had that a little (I'm going off memory). But, I think everything was better in the '70s.
I would probably call this one a little bland now but at the time I was captivated by the main piano riff to "The Way It Is". I remember being in an electronics store where a tv was playing the video (age 5 or so), that might have been my first exposure to music videos. All that focus on Bruce's hands definitely reinforced the how piano-centric the song was...heady stuff for a little kid.
I never owned a proper CD player. I started buying cassettes with the White Album in 1980, and pretty much bought nothing but cassettes after that. It was because of my Walkman mainly. I remember still buying the Beatles Anthology on cassette in 1996, but I finally bought my first CD to get one of their singles (Real Love I think) that had extra content. After that I mostly bought CD, because I had a player in my computer and my car, but as I say, never had a dedicated CD player. Still have never downloaded anything from Spotify. I'm nothing if not consistently behind the times!
The Way it Is The smooth, easy listening sound of this song is dentist-office ready to be sure. I still think it's OK, and certainly better than some of the other recent chart toppers. My favorite part is the extended instrumental bits where Hornsby shows off his keyboard chops on an actual piano instead of on some electronic something-or-other. As I said before, I'm not all that impressed by the way he makes his statement, to the point where I didn't initially even realizing he WAS making a statement. If you're going to Say Something, I think it's better if you don't sound like Chuck Mangione's keyboard-playing brother. Even the title of the song is very mealy mouthed. Terrible injustice? Oh well, nothing you can do about it, that's the way it is (sad trombone). I prefer either you go "in your face" with your message, or else go the other direction, and couch your opinions in pop a la the Poppy Family! Only in the seventies did you get sweet pop sounds melded with controversial issues in one frothy and thought provoking package! Video: The video is ultra average, if that makes sense. If there were a measure for "average", this would hit 100. For a brief moment, I thought it was a parody of McCartney's video for Coming Up, with Hornsby playing all the members of his band, before I realized there was little range in the looks of the Range.
Oatsdad Ain't Too Bright Part 839: I forgot that we did officially move on to "The Way It Is"... even though I already commented on it. I demanded that we move to that song when we'd already done so.
"End Of The Innocence" seems almost inspired by this tune. There are certainly similarities in its piano-forward sound. We were still like a year away from a broader shift in the sound of the Top 40, but it was definitely coming - more of this folk/acoustic singer/songwriter throwback sound, as well as more electronic dance music picking up where synth pop had left off. More of the Minneapolis sound as well, which had taken on a life of its own.
I think Hornsby was trying to target an older audience that held those sentiments. That audience never believed in the "in your face" approach.
It took me years to discover that Ambrosia’s Joe Puerta was a member of The Range. One of the more obscure family tree connections out there
I was hoping not to jump ahead in the timeline, but . . . that to me sounded like a Hornsby/Range song with guest vocals . . . I heard a later (than this, but preceding that) Hornsby song more in that number, though.
I’m not sure but it certainly had elements of funk and R’n’B and a certain hardness and edginess to the beat. I don’t hear any NJS in Word Up though. You compare it to something like what Jam & Lewis and Teddy Riley were producing and it doesn’t stack up as NJS. To my ears anyway.
Which is a shame because a lot of the originals on DD (Little Guitars, Secrets, Hang Em High) are among my favorite Roth-era songs.
