Give it to me Give me that stuff That funk That sweet That funky stuff Give it to me, give it to me.
—“Give It to Me Baby,” by Rick James (1981)
“Give It to Me Baby” became Rick’s second single to reach number 1 on the Billboard R&B chart, after “You and I.” It spent five weeks of its twenty-five-week stay in that position. It was less popular with white audiencess, however, never reaching higher than number 40 during its two weeks on the top pop 40 chart.
“Give It to Me Baby” referred to just what you think it does. As one wry reviewer in the London Daily Telegraph noted, the song “was not a request for dinner.” It was so popular because, as Rick pointed out, many men “can relate to being too high or too intoxicated and your old lady don’t want to make love to you . . . all you can say is just ‘Give it to me.’”
Some feminists were shocked by the song, since it seems to be about men demanding sex from women who don’t want to give it to them. Many women would say this approach encourages rape and that instead of demanding sex the man involved might try cajoling them into cooperating, or just go ahead and pass out. Present-day rock lyrics, to say nothing of rap lyrics, have long eclipsed such verbal violations of feminine preferences, however. At the time, Rick got away with the lyrics partly by modifying his description of the situation to create sympathy for the man involved. “You [the man] can’t [have sex] because you’re too bent,” Rick said of the song on several occasions. He told one interviewer that the song “is really about impotence—being too high to make love.” In an interview with Right On! magazine he said the tune “was basically meant to be funny.”
The video of the tune makes the song more acceptable by paying attention to the details of the situation it describes, beginning with the song’s introductory lyrics: “When I came home last night, you wouldn’t make love to me.” A character played by Rick comes home still drinking champagne as he exits his limousine, but far from drunk, so the viewer can assume that the song is referring to the previous night, not the night portrayed in the video. Rick’s gorgeous young African American wife, played by Jere Fields, at first looks disgusted at Rick’s demand for love because they’d had an argument the evening before. She responds not by locking him out of the bedroom, however, but by changing from her nightgown into her bikini and enticing him to join her in a midnight swim. Rick strips down to his Speedo and joins her in their private pool, she becomes more and more loving, and at the end of the video he carries her inside in his arms. They’re obviously about to make love consensually.
The other hit tune on this album, “Ghetto Life,” was about Rick’s return to the city of his birth. In some ways that experience had been a downer: most of Buffalo’s factories had closed and the city’s remaining supply of good union jobs had evaporated. “There was no hope for making any kind of a living,” author Craig Werner wrote. “So you could see the hustling culture developing at the time. And Rick catches that beautifully.”
On the Street Songs album jacket, Rick described what had become a permanent ghetto, including, he told Werner, the area’s “pimps and hos, dope dealers, getting high, having a good time and dancing, crying, making love . . . the police and the player haters.”
“Ghetto Life” rose to number 38 on the Billboard Top R&B Singles Chart and stayed on the chart for ten weeks, but never rose above number 102 on the pop chart. It obviously appealed to black people much more than it did to white people.
A UK reviewer, noting that Buffalo, even in its prime, hadn’t been that good for Rick or many of its other residents, called “Ghetto Life” Rick’s description of “his deprived childhood over an infectiously grinding disco beat.” Elsewhere in the song Rick sang about “Tenement slums and corner bums / playing tag with winos was the only way to have some fun.” As these verses hint, unlike many other artists who tackled the subject, Rick sang about both the lows and the highs of American slums, instead of depicting people wallowing in unrelieved misery. The song also, very realistically, indicated the ghetto’s staying power: “One thing ’bout the ghetto, you don’t have to hurry / it’ll be there tomorrow, so people don’t you worry,” Rick sang.
Author Jonathan Lethem, writing about “Ghetto Life” in the New York Times after Rick’s death, said that “here’s where the promise of punk-funk is kept.” With the tune’s “ragged, furious guitars, blended with Rick’s ragged, furious voice and ragged, furious lyrics . . . genuine pride and defiance are impossible to mistake.”