Day After Day #75: Word Up!

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).

Word Up! (1986)

When you watch old music videos on YouTube, one thing you notice a lot is commenters pining for the good ol' days. The comments usually are along the lines of "This takes me back to when music was great, not like the crap we have today" or "I was 25 when this came out with a full head of hair and a Camaro. Now my wife left me and everything sucks." 

I'm not going down that road because I have no desire to go back to my youth, but there was definitely plenty of fun music going down in the '80s. Case in point, the funky lunatics in Cameo were one of the weirdest and best party acts going. In 1986, they were riding high but they took a long road to get there.

Larry Blackmon (the dude with the red codpiece) formed the band in 1974 as the New York City Players; they were signed by Casablanca Records imprint Chocolate City the following year as The Players, but they had to change their name after Mercury Records said it was too similar to the Ohio Players. The name Cameo came from a Canadian brand of cigarettes they had seen.

They were a hard funk act similar to Parliament when they started out, but Cameo expanded their sound to appeal to the burgeoning dance scene. Cameo did well on the R&B charts with songs like "Flirt" and "Shake Your Pants" but they started to break through to a wider audience in 1984 with the title track to their album "She's Strange," which got to #47 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

On their 13th album, 1986's Word Up!, Cameo hit it big. The title track is totally 1986: monster funk riff, plenty of synths and horns, Blackmon's funkier-than-funky vocals, some guitar flourishes and a ridiculously catchy chorus, as well as the opening notes of the theme to The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. Oh, and it had a video featuring Levar Burton that was on MTV all the time.

"Wave your hands in the air/Like you don't care, glide by/The people as they start to look and stare/Do your dance, do your dance quick/Mama, come on baby, tell me what's the word, ah, word up."

It's one of those songs that never fails to fill up the dance floor and it certainly took off in 1986. It was Cameo's first top 40 hit in the U.S., shooting all the way to #6 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #1 on the R&B chart and the Hot Dance Singles chart. It was also a big hit in the U.K., spending 10 weeks in the top 40 over there and peaking at #3.

"Now all you sucker DJs/who think you're fly/There's got to be a reason/And we know the reason why/You try to put on those airs/And act real cool/But you got to realize/That you're acting like fools/If there's music we can use it/We need to dance/We don't have no time for psychological romance."

Cameo had another top 40 hit with the follow-up single "Candy," and the Word Up! album went platinum, going top 10 in both the U.S. and the U.K. That was the height of the band's popularity, though, as subsequent albums fared less well. The band kept going until 2000, when it went on hiatus. Cameo reunited in 2016 for a Las Vegas residency.

The song "Word Up!" has been covered by several artists, including Korn (not good), Mel B (aka Scary Spice, from the Austin Powers 2 soundtrack), Scottish hard rock act Gun and British girl group Little Mix. Hopefully they made Blackmon and Cameo some more money to keep those red codpieces in stock.