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The Hit
You know what’s on the second you hear the horns, but Cheryl Lynn’s “Got to Be Real” coasts into nice bubbling funk bass, warm pulses of electric piano and a beat so simple that the most two-footed dancer couldn’t lose from there. The bass gets a top-end through the bridge/chorus. If you listen to the extended version (as opposed to the radio edit), you get a long swinging bop passage with a treble piano part and a rising horn progression dancing over it.
Recorded in 1978, it has to rank near the top of the most famous songs of the disco era. For all that, it didn’t show up in nearly as many movie soundtracks as you’d expect - 1990s Paris Is Burning is the only one mentioned in Wikipedia’s entry for it - though Mary J. Blige and Will Smith covered it for 2004’s Shark Tale.
Lynn co-wrote it with a guy named David Foster and the Marty and David Paich songwriting team - the latter went on to become the keyboardist for Toto - and it launched her career. The original recording featured at least one more name/reference I knew besides Paich - Ray Parker, Jr. played guitar on it (to finish the thought, David Shields played bass and James Gadson hit the skins) - and Lynn would work with famous names throughout her fairly robust career.
With the single to carry it, Lynn’s eponymous debut album hit one million copies sold in a blink and topped out at No. 5 on the Billboard album charts. The single only reached No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100, but went all the way to No. 1 on Billboard’s R&B charts - another touchstone in her career. As noted in a glowing retrospective of her anthology on a site called The Second Disc, another single from her debut, “Star Love,” charted at No. 16 - a fact that, for me, rescues her from the (alleged) stain of being a one-hit wonder; count the R&B charts (and why wouldn’t you?), and she’s not even close.
Lynn’s smash has a hell of a legacy, as a guy named DJ Prince Language explains in his notes on Paris is Burning:
You know what’s on the second you hear the horns, but Cheryl Lynn’s “Got to Be Real” coasts into nice bubbling funk bass, warm pulses of electric piano and a beat so simple that the most two-footed dancer couldn’t lose from there. The bass gets a top-end through the bridge/chorus. If you listen to the extended version (as opposed to the radio edit), you get a long swinging bop passage with a treble piano part and a rising horn progression dancing over it.
Recorded in 1978, it has to rank near the top of the most famous songs of the disco era. For all that, it didn’t show up in nearly as many movie soundtracks as you’d expect - 1990s Paris Is Burning is the only one mentioned in Wikipedia’s entry for it - though Mary J. Blige and Will Smith covered it for 2004’s Shark Tale.
Lynn co-wrote it with a guy named David Foster and the Marty and David Paich songwriting team - the latter went on to become the keyboardist for Toto - and it launched her career. The original recording featured at least one more name/reference I knew besides Paich - Ray Parker, Jr. played guitar on it (to finish the thought, David Shields played bass and James Gadson hit the skins) - and Lynn would work with famous names throughout her fairly robust career.
With the single to carry it, Lynn’s eponymous debut album hit one million copies sold in a blink and topped out at No. 5 on the Billboard album charts. The single only reached No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100, but went all the way to No. 1 on Billboard’s R&B charts - another touchstone in her career. As noted in a glowing retrospective of her anthology on a site called The Second Disc, another single from her debut, “Star Love,” charted at No. 16 - a fact that, for me, rescues her from the (alleged) stain of being a one-hit wonder; count the R&B charts (and why wouldn’t you?), and she’s not even close.
Lynn’s smash has a hell of a legacy, as a guy named DJ Prince Language explains in his notes on Paris is Burning:
