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| The band's all here. For a time. |
On the one hand, who does not know this song? On the other, who knows where it came from and how that connects it to a musical legend?
The Hit
For anyone who has ever wondered what puts the digital fry into vocals in the verses in Lipps Inc.’s “Funkytown,” it’s a vocoder, the parent (or grandparent) of Auto-Tune. For anyone who thinks of it as a disco anthem, it dropped nine months after the rightly infamous Disco Demolition Night. As noted on the official Funky Town site:
“’Funkytown’ put the Minneapolis group Lipps, Inc. on the map, at a time when popular music was pre-Prince and post-punk. The obituaries for disco were being written; Lipps, Inc. put the funeral on hold.”
Shit. I meant to bury the Prince reveal, but the way he flits on the edges of the story flags an important divide in the larger, yet brief narrative.
As for the song, it starts with a naked kick-drum that could lead into just about any pop song. To put the rest in a Name That Tune frame, I’m guessing 40% of contestants when the rattling cowbell comes in (0:04); the snare drum (0:08) doesn’t give much away, but the honking car horn (0:12) might knock another handful of contestants off the fence; another 20% would catch on with the loping bass (0:23), and I’m confident you’d arrive at 100% after the first four notes on the keys, maybe even two. It’s a lot of wash-rinse-repeat from there and the album mix probably goes on longer than you think (just south of eight minutes), but, when you’re on the dancefloor (probably a touch high), you don’t give a shit. As the great Marv “The Leatherman” Gomez says in the film classic, Thank God It’s Friday, “Dancing! Everything else is bullshit!”
Musically, it serves a purpose. Thematically, it speaks to something broader. From a 2018 edition of Time Out from “Funkytown’s” Wikipedia page:
“'Funkytown' expresses a simple, repetitive yearning for the pulse of a bigger city, goosed by a killer ten-note synth riff. 'Gotta make a move to a town that's right for me,' sings Cynthia Johnson in a robotic, vocoderized voice (a precursor to the Auto-Tune sound) before busting out an unmodified, soulful wail, pleading for a trip to the party destination of her dreams. Released in 1980, 'Funkytown' came late to the disco party, but gave it a jolt of electricity.”
With Cynthia Johnson wet get half the story of Lipps Inc., both the good parts and the tragedy. Time to meet the other half…
The Rest of the Story
“Well the lyrics are ‘Gotta make a move to a town that’s right for me,’ basically, and I wanted to get out of here. The scene here was very bland, there was no black radio. Maybe KMOJ played a little bit but it wasn’t really out there. I grew up on the Temptations and Motown and stuff like that, Earth, Wind & Fire, and you couldn’t get that here. It was very vanilla. A very vanilla market.”
- Steve Greenberg, interview with The Current (2014)
The story of Lipps Inc. starts with Steve Greenberg, a Minneapolis party/wedding DJ (and more) who woke up one day and decided to write a disco song. He’d done some work as a producer - e.g., The Suburbs the Twin/Tone label along with a bunch of other “punk/new wave-ish stuff” - so he wasn’t going in blind. After getting a pile of songs on paper and getting the music recorded (using session musicians, including a guitarist named David Rivkin), Greenberg put feelers out for the right vocalist to bring it home. Some number of auditions into coming up empty, one of the women who auditioned volunteered a local singer, Cynthia Johnson. Feeling equal parts awkward and like he had nothing to lose, Greenberg cold-called Johnson to offer her an audition. She agreed. Now, here’s her story…
“He didn’t come from my hood. In my hood, it was funky. In my hood, the garages and the basements from St. Paul to Minneapolis were littered with players and musicians and singers, and the churches were alive with music. We were from different sides of the tracks.”
- Cynthia Johnson, when asked about Greenberg's take on the Minneapolis scene, Mpls St Paul (2021)
Like a lot of singers and musicians, Johnson grew up in a musical household. Her father was a saxophonist with the chops to tour, while her mother directed the church choir when she wasn’t working for Honeywell. Johnson sang in that same choir, but she learned how to at home; on stormy nights, Johnson’s mother took the elaborate approach of gathering her kids into the living room and teaching them how to harmonize as a way to calm her nerves. In her teens, Johnson sang “Wings of a Dove” at the funeral of a friend how died in a shooting. Her baby break came after, when a high school friend named Joey Kareem asked her if she’d like to join a band he played in called Flyte Tyme.
In that 2021 Mpls St Paul piece (best thing I read, btw), Johnson uses Flyte Tyme as a point of reference, a kind of North Star for the happiness she gets out of music and performing. They played a “heavy, brassy, danceable funk” that did all right on the campus circuit and black venues (the “legendary Fox Trap” anyone?), and they competed in battle(s) of the bands at a community center called The Way, and against other locals like Prince, Morris Day and Andre Cymone, but didn’t get anywhere with Minneapolis’ white clubs. Because she was the youngest and the only woman, the other members of Flyte Tyme looked out for her like a little sister. It lasted as long as it did, and she has fond memories, but members of the band drifted away and settled down one after another. Feeling the same pull, Johnson poked around for something steady and found it in a jazz lounge at White Bear Lake. By the time Flyte Tyme folded she’d already been replaced…and then came the call from Greenberg. He “needed somebody to hit the high notes.”
Johnson likened singing the vocals on Greenberg's songs to recording a commercial jingle. Still, they got along well enough and, not long after introductions, Greenberg invited her into Lipps Inc. as a partner. They co-wrote “Funky Town” and, per Greenberg, they nailed the final product (“it’s actually one of the only songs I’ve ever written that actually came out exactly like I wanted it to come out”), but that wasn’t the song that sold them to Casablanca Records: that would be “Rock It.” Funny aside, when Greenberg talked up “Funkytown” as the label execs sent him home, they responded with some form of “sure, kid, sure.” Lipps Inc. sent 1980’s Mouth to Mouth back to the label and out it went. It wasn’t long before they called Greenberg to tell him the single had sold 23,000 copies in New York City alone in one day. It went global from there, climbing to or near the top of the charts in 28 countries before the summer. And them summer ended.
The Hit
For anyone who has ever wondered what puts the digital fry into vocals in the verses in Lipps Inc.’s “Funkytown,” it’s a vocoder, the parent (or grandparent) of Auto-Tune. For anyone who thinks of it as a disco anthem, it dropped nine months after the rightly infamous Disco Demolition Night. As noted on the official Funky Town site:
“’Funkytown’ put the Minneapolis group Lipps, Inc. on the map, at a time when popular music was pre-Prince and post-punk. The obituaries for disco were being written; Lipps, Inc. put the funeral on hold.”
Shit. I meant to bury the Prince reveal, but the way he flits on the edges of the story flags an important divide in the larger, yet brief narrative.
As for the song, it starts with a naked kick-drum that could lead into just about any pop song. To put the rest in a Name That Tune frame, I’m guessing 40% of contestants when the rattling cowbell comes in (0:04); the snare drum (0:08) doesn’t give much away, but the honking car horn (0:12) might knock another handful of contestants off the fence; another 20% would catch on with the loping bass (0:23), and I’m confident you’d arrive at 100% after the first four notes on the keys, maybe even two. It’s a lot of wash-rinse-repeat from there and the album mix probably goes on longer than you think (just south of eight minutes), but, when you’re on the dancefloor (probably a touch high), you don’t give a shit. As the great Marv “The Leatherman” Gomez says in the film classic, Thank God It’s Friday, “Dancing! Everything else is bullshit!”
Musically, it serves a purpose. Thematically, it speaks to something broader. From a 2018 edition of Time Out from “Funkytown’s” Wikipedia page:
“'Funkytown' expresses a simple, repetitive yearning for the pulse of a bigger city, goosed by a killer ten-note synth riff. 'Gotta make a move to a town that's right for me,' sings Cynthia Johnson in a robotic, vocoderized voice (a precursor to the Auto-Tune sound) before busting out an unmodified, soulful wail, pleading for a trip to the party destination of her dreams. Released in 1980, 'Funkytown' came late to the disco party, but gave it a jolt of electricity.”
With Cynthia Johnson wet get half the story of Lipps Inc., both the good parts and the tragedy. Time to meet the other half…
The Rest of the Story
“Well the lyrics are ‘Gotta make a move to a town that’s right for me,’ basically, and I wanted to get out of here. The scene here was very bland, there was no black radio. Maybe KMOJ played a little bit but it wasn’t really out there. I grew up on the Temptations and Motown and stuff like that, Earth, Wind & Fire, and you couldn’t get that here. It was very vanilla. A very vanilla market.”
- Steve Greenberg, interview with The Current (2014)
The story of Lipps Inc. starts with Steve Greenberg, a Minneapolis party/wedding DJ (and more) who woke up one day and decided to write a disco song. He’d done some work as a producer - e.g., The Suburbs the Twin/Tone label along with a bunch of other “punk/new wave-ish stuff” - so he wasn’t going in blind. After getting a pile of songs on paper and getting the music recorded (using session musicians, including a guitarist named David Rivkin), Greenberg put feelers out for the right vocalist to bring it home. Some number of auditions into coming up empty, one of the women who auditioned volunteered a local singer, Cynthia Johnson. Feeling equal parts awkward and like he had nothing to lose, Greenberg cold-called Johnson to offer her an audition. She agreed. Now, here’s her story…
“He didn’t come from my hood. In my hood, it was funky. In my hood, the garages and the basements from St. Paul to Minneapolis were littered with players and musicians and singers, and the churches were alive with music. We were from different sides of the tracks.”
- Cynthia Johnson, when asked about Greenberg's take on the Minneapolis scene, Mpls St Paul (2021)
Like a lot of singers and musicians, Johnson grew up in a musical household. Her father was a saxophonist with the chops to tour, while her mother directed the church choir when she wasn’t working for Honeywell. Johnson sang in that same choir, but she learned how to at home; on stormy nights, Johnson’s mother took the elaborate approach of gathering her kids into the living room and teaching them how to harmonize as a way to calm her nerves. In her teens, Johnson sang “Wings of a Dove” at the funeral of a friend how died in a shooting. Her baby break came after, when a high school friend named Joey Kareem asked her if she’d like to join a band he played in called Flyte Tyme.
In that 2021 Mpls St Paul piece (best thing I read, btw), Johnson uses Flyte Tyme as a point of reference, a kind of North Star for the happiness she gets out of music and performing. They played a “heavy, brassy, danceable funk” that did all right on the campus circuit and black venues (the “legendary Fox Trap” anyone?), and they competed in battle(s) of the bands at a community center called The Way, and against other locals like Prince, Morris Day and Andre Cymone, but didn’t get anywhere with Minneapolis’ white clubs. Because she was the youngest and the only woman, the other members of Flyte Tyme looked out for her like a little sister. It lasted as long as it did, and she has fond memories, but members of the band drifted away and settled down one after another. Feeling the same pull, Johnson poked around for something steady and found it in a jazz lounge at White Bear Lake. By the time Flyte Tyme folded she’d already been replaced…and then came the call from Greenberg. He “needed somebody to hit the high notes.”
Johnson likened singing the vocals on Greenberg's songs to recording a commercial jingle. Still, they got along well enough and, not long after introductions, Greenberg invited her into Lipps Inc. as a partner. They co-wrote “Funky Town” and, per Greenberg, they nailed the final product (“it’s actually one of the only songs I’ve ever written that actually came out exactly like I wanted it to come out”), but that wasn’t the song that sold them to Casablanca Records: that would be “Rock It.” Funny aside, when Greenberg talked up “Funkytown” as the label execs sent him home, they responded with some form of “sure, kid, sure.” Lipps Inc. sent 1980’s Mouth to Mouth back to the label and out it went. It wasn’t long before they called Greenberg to tell him the single had sold 23,000 copies in New York City alone in one day. It went global from there, climbing to or near the top of the charts in 28 countries before the summer. And them summer ended.
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| Not an exaggeration... |
From what I gather, the partnership concept petered out fast and for a variety of reason. Johnson still stews about the fact that she was, in the words of Mnpls St Paul, “erased from visual materials” and generally unrecognized even as Casablanca “whisked away” Greenberg to LA for a big celebration of “Funkytown.” It’s not 100% clear that Johnson wasn’t invited to the release party, but what is clear is that she had an abusive partner who trapped her and her daughter-to-be in “patterns of control,” and she wasn’t exaggerating her erasure: the album cover for Mouth to Mouth features “white cartoon faces” instead of either her or Greenberg, and she didn’t get to appear in either of the two music videos that promoted the single. A British woman performing as Doris D (aka, Debbie Jenner) became the face for Lipps Inc. in the Netherlands and Germany, but having “three Black women dancing and lip syncing” where she very readily could have must have hit Johnson like a slap in the face. And, just to interject, this was a really bizarre choice, even by the standards of the industry, because Johnson looked plenty stage-ready to me.
Lipps Inc., the project, kept on for two more albums - Pucker Up (1980) and Designer Music (1981). Neither completely crashed/burned - and their cover of Ace’s “How Long” reached well into the single digits on the dance charts in 1981 - but, feeling isolated in both her contract and her marriage, Cynthia Johnson walked away from both. With a daughter to raise, she went back to the only work she’d ever done, working sessions and gigging. Before long, Jam and Lewis, some old friends from Rhyme Tyme, circled back and invited her to join them in the Time, now the backup band for Morris Day. And off on tour with Prince she went…
Greenberg still speaks very highly of Johnson. He also says they both own rights to the master recording of “Funkytown” as Lipps Inc., which he'd hope to reclaim in 2015. I don’t know if that ever happened (2014 interview, after all), but he did retain the copyright and licensing that follows from. Despite what you might think, Greenberg doesn’t let just anyone use “Funkytown.” In The Current interview, he mentions turning down a Florida car dealership, and despite them offering him a stupid amount of money. As he puts it, “I feel like it’s kind of my baby, and I treat it as such.”
His baby. It's all a little fraught, isn’t it? At least Johnson had a good, long turn as a kind of godmother to the North Minneapolis scene…
About the Sampler
I was pretty damn restrained on this one. I kept it down to 10 songs and three of those came from Doris D and the Pins (“Shine Up,” “Dance on,” and “The Marvelous Marionettes”; who were more a dance trroupe than a musical project) for shits and giggles…and, shit. Apologies for pulling a Casablanca Records on that one, but morbid curiosity got the better of me, and was satisfied.
The selection for Lipps Inc. - and, for the record, I finally got the pun shortly after I stopped calling them “Lipps Incorporated” (shoot me) - isn’t extensive, not least because their catalog is small and pretty repetitive. For what it’s worth, I’d call “Choir Practice” the most compelling of the bunch, with the guitar-heavy “Tight Pair” following as a close second. It’s more or less throw-away disco from there, something that happened because a wedding DJ/producer decided to write some disco songs. I added two - the aptly-named “All Night Dancing” and “Addicted to the Night” - just to get to a round number.
That’s it, and until the next one. For now, all I’ll say is that it ain’t disco.…
Lipps Inc., the project, kept on for two more albums - Pucker Up (1980) and Designer Music (1981). Neither completely crashed/burned - and their cover of Ace’s “How Long” reached well into the single digits on the dance charts in 1981 - but, feeling isolated in both her contract and her marriage, Cynthia Johnson walked away from both. With a daughter to raise, she went back to the only work she’d ever done, working sessions and gigging. Before long, Jam and Lewis, some old friends from Rhyme Tyme, circled back and invited her to join them in the Time, now the backup band for Morris Day. And off on tour with Prince she went…
Greenberg still speaks very highly of Johnson. He also says they both own rights to the master recording of “Funkytown” as Lipps Inc., which he'd hope to reclaim in 2015. I don’t know if that ever happened (2014 interview, after all), but he did retain the copyright and licensing that follows from. Despite what you might think, Greenberg doesn’t let just anyone use “Funkytown.” In The Current interview, he mentions turning down a Florida car dealership, and despite them offering him a stupid amount of money. As he puts it, “I feel like it’s kind of my baby, and I treat it as such.”
His baby. It's all a little fraught, isn’t it? At least Johnson had a good, long turn as a kind of godmother to the North Minneapolis scene…
About the Sampler
I was pretty damn restrained on this one. I kept it down to 10 songs and three of those came from Doris D and the Pins (“Shine Up,” “Dance on,” and “The Marvelous Marionettes”; who were more a dance trroupe than a musical project) for shits and giggles…and, shit. Apologies for pulling a Casablanca Records on that one, but morbid curiosity got the better of me, and was satisfied.
The selection for Lipps Inc. - and, for the record, I finally got the pun shortly after I stopped calling them “Lipps Incorporated” (shoot me) - isn’t extensive, not least because their catalog is small and pretty repetitive. For what it’s worth, I’d call “Choir Practice” the most compelling of the bunch, with the guitar-heavy “Tight Pair” following as a close second. It’s more or less throw-away disco from there, something that happened because a wedding DJ/producer decided to write some disco songs. I added two - the aptly-named “All Night Dancing” and “Addicted to the Night” - just to get to a round number.
That’s it, and until the next one. For now, all I’ll say is that it ain’t disco.…
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