Because I Need You Tonight
Most of my best ideas come from shuffling my music. Yesterday I published a short list of songs that I listened to in the car. I could do this forever, and maybe I should, because it’s so fun!
I’m going to take us back to 1985. No, wait. I’m going to take us back to 2005. A massive embarrassment that I share with most other Millennials is that the first time I became familiar with this song is through the damn Black Eyed Peas’ “Don’t Phunk With My Heart,” their first single after the last of the hits on their smash hit album Elephunk finally left the charts. I doubt even die-hard Black Eyed Peas fans like this song. It was destined for radio play because of the massive success of their previous album, but it is a bad song. It was followed by the legendary “My Humps,” which I’ll admit I still know every word to, despite its patent absurdity.
Anyway, throughout “Don’t Phunk With My Heart,” Fergie sort of mutter-sings like two lines from legendary 1985 freestyle single “I Wonder If I Take You Home” by Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam with Full Force (catchy, I know). “I Wonder If I Take You Home” has been sampled and covered an incredible number of times in 40 years, by artists ranging from Kylie Minogue to Missy Elliott to Meek Mill to Mariah Carey to Pitbull to Meshell Ndegeocello, although never quite as annoyingly as the way the Black Eyed Peas did it.
Freestyle was a relatively short-lived genre based in New York City from about 1982 to 1988, stemming from Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock” and Shannon’s “Let the Music Play.” It’s super club-oriented hip hop primarily from Nuyorican communities in the Bronx and elsewhere in NYC.
Apart from Shannon, who I adore, Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam was one of the best-known and most successful freestyle acts.“I Wonder If I Take You Home” went to #1 on the Billboard Dance Club Play chart and brought the band to national attention. The first two songs off their next album, Spanish Fly from 1987, both reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100. But “I Wonder If I Take You Home” remains my favorite; this song is six minutes and forty-five seconds long and it is quite a journey. The lyrics are largely structured like a children’s nursery rhyme or a hand-clapping game, although the lyrical content is about Lisa Lisa thinking that the relationship with her man is going to change for the worse if she sleeps with him. It’s basically a long diary entry!
Freestyle is interesting musically. The beat and a lot of the instrumentation stays remarkably consistent throughout the entire length. Lisa Lisa’s voice is coquettish and almost impish as she calls and responds to her own calls. She was, after all, only 18 when they recorded this song. Her innocence as expressed in the lyrics ends up being quite believable. It’s like a few years advanced in maturity past Vanessa Paradis’s “Joe Le Taxi,” which I’ll write about another night.
I’m going to post the track as normal, and also the music video, which is peak 1985, but the music video version of the song is abridged and the song deserves a full listen.
While Lisa Lisa’s voice is delightful and remains the rightful main focus of the song, the music deserves a mention, too. Considering how consistent the music is, it uses so many different percussion sounds, synth sounds, dings, bells, vocal samples, just every button on every machine they had access to. Despite this huge variety, the song is so solid throughout its entire runtime. It’s a treat still today.