Most people don’t realize they’re a freak until it’s way too late to change it.
—“Meredith Grey” on Grey’s Anatomy
“Super Freak,” the highlight of Street Songs, is the most famous song Rick James ever wrote, becoming a major hit shortly after it was released and a major hit again nine years later, when MC Hammer reworked it as “U Can’t Touch This.”
As Rick told the Times (London), the tune was born when “[I] was listening to the tracks, just riffing on my bass, and I hit on this punky-funky sounding line. The song came together, I had the Tempts singing behind me, and next thing I know it’s a smash.” This may be the greatest simplification in pop music history.
One of the song’s strengths was indeed Rick’s use of the Temptations to sing background, an effective homage to one of the most famous and long-lived acts to precede Rick at Motown. (The Tempts had left Motown in 1976 and did not return until 1980.) Rick said he chose the Tempts because they were “probably the most important vocal group in the history of black music.”
Rick may have been unique among Motown stars in using long-established predecessor acts at the company when recording his own songs. He did it not only with the Temptations but with Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson, and others. This habit indicated the depth of his gratitude for finally becoming a Motown star after three tries, as well as the depth of his admiration for the most successful black music company in American history.
To make sure the audience knew who the backing singers were, Rick introduced their contribution to “Super Freak” with the words, “Temptations, sing!” In the video of the song, the footage of the Tempts singing is in black-and-white, while footage of Rick and his backup singers is in color—a clue that he saw the Tempts, at the top from 1965 to 1973, as part of the historical past. However, his reverence for them is real and apparent, with the Tempts portrayed in one of their patented bend-down, front-scoop, side-turn, side-clap moves. In an additional show of respect, Rick’s five female fellow performers repeat the Tempts moves a few second later.
“Super Freak” was complex in many other ways. Much of the song’s popularity, including its strong erotic appeal, was its opening line: “She’s a very kinky girl.” Reviewers called this the best opening lyric ever; its obvious strength is that it entices listeners to keep listening to find out why she’s kinky. At least one songwriter, Christopher Ward, ranked “She’s a very kinky girl” in the same class with the Beatles lyric “She was just seventeen, you know what I mean,” which began their 1963 song “I Saw Her Standing There” (“What do you mean?” the listener asks). Ward also linked it with the lyric “I heard the news today, oh boy,” which opened the Beatles’s 1967 song “A Day in the Life.” (“What news did you hear?” the listener wonders.) This was only the beginning of English influence on the song. It could almost be said that “Super Freak” was an English song that happened to be written and recorded by African Americans.
But the lyrics listeners have come to know and love were not the ones he originally penned. Rick wrote in The Confessions of Rick James that the original lyrics he wrote for the song “were nasty, to say the least—too nasty for radio.” He became aware of this when he sang the tune to his friend Alonzo Miller, a DJ and program director at KACE-FM, an L.A. radio station. “After hearing the lyrics, he just shook his head and said, ‘Rick, they’ll never play it on the radio.’” Among the lyrics Miller objected to was the line “She will never let your spirits down / Once you get her in the sheets.” He suggested that Rick change it to “Once you get her off the street,” which Rick agreed to do. Miller added that he’d always thought Rick was slicker than his lyrics and that that was what separated Rick from Prince. Convinced by this argument, Rick and Miller cleaned up the lyrics, and Rick gave Miller 10 percent of the song’s publishing royalties for helping him “see the light.” (Miller is credited as a cowriter of the song.)
LeRoi Johnson told Rick it was a great song and different from the other songs, but Rick kept criticizing it as “too English technopop,” and too “new wave.” MTV had just started broadcasting shortly after “Super Freak” was released, at that time as a channel that played many new wave videos twenty-four hour per day and inadvertently popularized the new wave technopop sound, thus contributing to the popularity of “Super Freak,” Rick’s biggest hit. That MTV later refused to broadcast the “Super Freak” video makes this entire progression highly ironic.
“Super Freak” referred to its new wave status in its own lyrics. One of the lines in the song is, “The kind of girl you read about in new wave magazines.” Many US listeners unfamiliar with new wave music thought the reference was to Newsweek magazine. And, in fact, the first time the background vocalists sing it in the recorded song it does sound much more like Newsweek than “new wave.”
Rick told author David Ritz the song came about when he came up with a line that reminded him of “how punkers look funny when they try to dance. I heard it as a goof and never dreamed it’d take off.” Because Rick and his fellow musicians thought of this song, which they themselves had written, as an English song, someone in the group suggested to Rick that he use an English cockney accent when recording it. Rick sang it not only with a slight cockney accent but in a high, cartoonish voice that made him sound smarmy and leering when he sang the slightly risqué lyrics. This added to the song’s erotic appeal.
Rick thought the lyrics to “Super Freak” were silly. “The line about ‘she’s the kind of girl you don’t take home to mother’ was jive,” Rick said. “I could take any girl home to mother.” LeRoi Johnson says he actually had to talk his brother into including the song on the album. When asked if Rick ever acknowledged that he was right about “Super Freak,” Johnson says he’d occasionally tell Rick, “You were wrong about ‘Super Freak’ and then he’d give me that look, that ‘So what?’ look, a look that said, ‘OK, you were right once, but so what?’”
As it turned out, the “Super Freak” lyrics, when combined with its music, were extremely catchy. Once people heard Rick sing “That girl is pretty kinky,” and the background singers reply, “That girl’s a super freak” it became hard to forget the song, especially because in those relatively innocent days, its words were startling. One reviewer described them as “raunchy groupie lyrics.” Reviewers also liked the song for what the Washington Post called its “mysterious, frenetic energy,” probably due to the combination of its sexy lyrics with a thumping bass line.
Another odd thing about “Super Freak” was that after Rick and Miller edited the lyrics, it wasn’t as obscene as many people thought. Rick was right when he said the song wasn’t meant to have an especially bad connotation. While it was considered erotic and scandalous at the time—and the smarmy voice Rick sang it in added to that impression—it contained only two unarguably erotic references. Referring to the woman who’s the subject of the song, Rick sings, “Three’s not a crowd to her” and quickly adds “ménage à trois.”
But Prince had already one-upped him the year before by singing about such trios in his song “When You Were Mine,” on his Dirty Mind album, which includes the line, “I never was the kind to make a fuss / when he was there / sleepin’ in between the two of us.” Prince’s lyrics indicated that the participants in his intimate grouping included at least two males, one of them himself. This is not a ménage in which Rick would willingly have participated.
The second unambiguous sexual reference in “Super Freak” occurred when Rick sang “I really love to taste her, every time we meet.” This obvious reference to cunnilingus may have been pushing the boundaries a little, but was cunnilingus really that freaky in 1981?
The song’s lyrics also contained the line, “Room 714, I’ll be waiting.” To those in the know, the line indicated that the couple in the song was planning to use drugs, because 714 was a widespread slang term for quaaludes.
The “Super Freak” video only added to the song’s erotic appeal and general popularity. In it, an in-shape, clear-eyed Rick appears wearing a sequined vest with a V-shaped opening, black pants with lightning bolt decorations, and high black boots. Physically as well as musically at the top of his game, he moves swiftly from one of his five female coperformers to another while singing, smiling, winking, smirking, and outlining a female form in the air, flicking his tongue in and out of his mouth, playing his guitar, and briefly using that instrument as a phallic symbol.
The four women onstage are a multiracial group: two whites, one African American, and one Asian American (Cheryl Song, who danced on the TV show Soul Train). In two brief scenes another African American woman appears. The sexy women use every publically presentable trick in the book to hold the viewers’ attention, including winking, pouting, looking astonished, sticking out their tongues, flipping their hair back, wiggling their hips, and shaking and thrusting out their breasts. They also stick out their tongues, flip their hair back, wave their hands and arms in the air, giggle with their hands over their mouths, dance with their nearly naked backs to the camera, move their hands near Rick’s crotch while gaping with astonishment, briefly flip up their skirts to reveal their own mostly naked legs, and move their heads back and forth with their arms straight up in the air. When they gesture at Rick to come hither, they look pleased but cover their mouths ineffectually with their hands in an attempt not to reveal their delight.
In an exceedingly sexy move, after the African American female performer dances for a moment with her mostly naked back to the camera, Rick dances butt to butt with her while playing his guitar and singing. And in an exceedingly democratic move, twice in the video Rick has everyone on the set dance in place behind him while he sings, including average-looking men and women in office-type outfits. At the end of the song he also introduces saxophonist LeMelle’s vibrant tenor sax solo with the words “Blow, Danny, blow.” (Rick gave LeMelle a similar verbal acknowledgment at the end of several songs he wrote later in his career.)
“[‘Super Freak’] was about all the girls I know,” Rick told Right On! magazine. “The girls with green and white hair, slits all the way up their butts.” He said its title “wasn’t meant as a bad connotation” but instead was “complimentary. It just means being sexually open and not constricted. To me, a freak was an uninhibited woman.” Yet the title came to be widely applied to Rick himself. The London Daily Telegraph speculated this may have happened because “the song’s loping bass line brought to mind a pimp out for his evening strut.” There was a deeper reason than that, however.
“Super Freak” meant “heavy drug user” to many listeners, and the song finally told the truth about the effects of Rick’s most ruinous pastime. By this point in his life, LeMelle says, “drugs pretty much consumed and controlled him” (although they had not yet cut as deeply into his abilities as an entertainer and a sexual being as they would later). By continuing to stand day after day, night after night, and year after year in the middle of the heavily traveled intersection of desire and availability, Rick eventually destroyed himself. But not before creating an extremely memorable pop song.
Journalists perceived the connection. Near the end of Rick’s life, one critic wrote that “the idea of Rick James calling anybody freaky is, face it, fascinating.” The Washington Post said that Rick’s “brash, boisterous, self-destructive life epitomized the title of his greatest hit.” And Newsday said that despite the many songs Rick had recorded before “Super Freak,” his “flamboyant outfits, chaotic personal life and sexually charged songs made him synonymous with this one song.” Although the subject of the song was the kind of girl “you don’t take home to mother,” Rick could easily have said the same thing about himself. And his listeners recognized and responded to this deeper meaning.
Although Rick didn’t receive a Grammy for “Super Freak” in 1982, his performance of that song made him the first black artist ever nominated for a Grammy for Best Rock Vocal Performance, Male. He was up against Bruce Springsteen, Rod Stewart, Gary “U.S.” Bonds, and Rick Springfield, who ultimately won the award for “Jessie’s Girl.” Nevertheless, Rick James was featured on the awards show performing another song from Street Songs, “Give It to Me Baby.”
Rick had kept “Super Freak” on the album despite his dislike of it partly because, while he never wanted to lose his black audience, he believed “Super Freak” would increase his popularity with white fans. He told one interviewer he wanted to have something “that white folks could dance to” on the disc.
Those white folks not only danced but helped make the record a hit. A crossover tune par excellence, “Super Freak” almost instantly changed the racial composition of Rick’s audience from mostly black to one-third white. Rick, “even more than Prince, has managed to bridge the distance between black and white audiences and idioms alike,” Don Waller of the Los Angeles Times said afterward. “The last time that happened, they had to invent a new name for the result—‘rock ’n’ roll.’” This couldn’t have made Rick happier—a rock ’n’ roller was exactly what he wanted to be.
Adding compliment to compliment, in 1995 Jim Henke, chief curator of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, in conjunction with a group of rock critics and historians, added “Super Freak” to the hall’s list of the five hundred songs that shaped rock ’n’ roll.
“Super Freak” appeared on the top R&B singles chart on August 1, 1981, rose to number 3, and stayed on the chart for seventeen weeks. Partly as a result of its rock ’n’ roll quality and its appeal to whites, it made the pop top 40 chart on September 5, 1981, rose to number 16, and didn’t drop off completely for ten weeks, becoming an across-the-board smash. From its release in 1981 through mid-1988, according to Motown, it sold 2,376,714 copies in all formats. Over the ensuing decades, it has kept selling: in 2006, the RIAA awarded a gold certification to its digital version, meaning that that version alone had sold more than five hundred thousand copies.
“Super Freak” was used in the film Doctor Detroit and in numerous other movies and TV shows, all of which were required to pay royalties to Rick. In addition to a great deal of money, the song also provided Rick with something else very important—a theme song.
It also caused the groupie scene surrounding Rick and his associates to rocket into the stratosphere, propelling him into affairs with various well-known and attractive women, including movie stars Elisabeth Shue and Linda Blair, model Janice Dickinson, and Marvin Gaye’s estranged wife, Jan Gaye.
His fame also caused him to be paired with vocalist Grace Jones as an award presenter at 1982’s American Music Awards. Jones was wearing a magnificent, but gigantic, transparent, Japanese-style, black-ribbed, inverted-bowl hat. Rick, acting very frisky with Jones, moved in on her under the hat, and ad-libbed to the crowd that he was “trying to get some.” Jones laughed and replied, “Some of what, may I ask?” and Rick said, “Some of this hat.” Jones replied, “I see. I get it,” and added, with a smile, “Well, that’s all right. Stay under there.”
A minute or so later, Rick said, “Stevie Wonder, you should see this hat.” Wonder, who is blind, was in the audience. Commentators criticized Rick for his remarks to both Jones and Wonder. Jones seemed unfazed, however, and at Rick’s funeral some years later, Wonder told the mourners that he “loved” Rick for “the laughter I had” at Rick’s remark. Wonder said he interpreted the remark as meaning “Wow. Look at that hat. It’s so big Stevie can see it.” Over the years Wonder has demonstrated that, counterintuitively, he enjoys jokes about his blindness.
Rick may have been acting frisky at the ceremony because of his affair with Jan Gaye. He knew the affair had angered Marvin, and his nerves were twanging with the thought that he might have to put himself within Marvin’s punching range onstage in order to hand an award to the vocalist. Rick’s fears were partly realized when Marvin won the prize for Favorite Soul/R&B Single for—of all tunes—his song “Sexual Healing.”
However, when Marvin moved close to Rick onstage to accept the award, he merely told Rick, “Take good care of her,” obviously referring to Jan. A little more than two years later, in April 1984, Gaye—who had been struggling with his own drug addiction, poverty, and sometime homelessness—was shot dead by his own father during a vicious argument.