White collar conservative flashin down the street, Pointing their plastic finger at me. They’re hoping soon, my kind will drop and die But I’m gonna wave my freak flag high.
—“If 6 Was 9,” by Jimi Hendrix (1969)
Although Glow celebrated Rick’s return to sobriety, he remained drug-free for only six months after leaving McLean. He then began producing another album of his own while also producing successful songs and albums for Eddie Murphy, Val Young, Process and the Doo-Rags, the Mary Jane Girls, and the Stone City Band.
By 1985 Rick was earning much more from the songs “Party All the Time,” “In My House,” and “Seduction”—a Top 20 black single he’d composed for Val Young—than from his own vocal efforts. The Murphy album sold seven hundred thousand copies in 1985, and the Mary Jane Girls sold seven hundred thousand of their own albums that same year.
Rick’s own next album, 1986’s The Flag, was highlighted by a very controversial song: “Funk in America/Silly Little Man.” Rick wrote in The Confessions of Rick James that he composed the song after being horrified to learn that there were fifteen thousand missiles in the United States alone. He said the song was aimed at Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and at President Reagan, whom he called the “assholes with the power of the button.”
The “Funk in America” portion of the composition was spoken rather than sung, and in it, Rick delivered a somber, pessimistic lecture about a real US policy stating that any enemy daring to launch a nuclear attack on America would be destroyed. Known as the mutually assured destruction (MAD) policy, it includes the mostly unspoken assumption that the United States would also be turned into rubble by the enemy’s incoming missiles.
Rick continued denouncing the MAD policy in the “Silly Little Man” portion of the piece, which he sang. It began with the line “Did you read the news, oh boy,” an obvious homage to the first line, “I read the news today, oh boy,” of the 1967 Beatles song “A Day in the Life.”
In “Silly Little Man,” Rick told his listeners a variant of the old Cold War joke, “If nuclear war occurs, put your head between your legs and kiss your ass good-bye.” (That humor had been based on real US Civil Defense instructions to citizens under nuclear attack to put their head between their legs to avoid head injuries.) In Rick’s version, he substituted “boop!” for “ass.”
In a more serious vein, at the end of the same cut, Rick added the sound of children playing. This detail was reminiscent of Lyndon Johnson’s so-called “daisy” campaign ad, which he’d planned to air during his 1964 presidential race against Barry Goldwater. The ad, which was widely publicized although it was broadcast only as a news item, showed a little girl playing with a flower just before she was vaporized by a nuclear blast. The Los Angeles Times complimented Rick for getting serious, if only briefly, with this song.
Some of Rick’s critics said that, musically, “Funk in America” was strongly reminiscent of tunes and riffs by Prince and Gil Scott-Heron, including Prince’s 1981 song “Ronnie, Talk to Russia,” in which the singer urged the president to begin arms control talks with the Soviets. Others said Rick seemed to be imitating Prince when he referred to President Ronald Reagan as “Ronnie,” just as he had in the song “Money Talks” on the Throwin’ Down album.
Hospital records reveal that when Rick recorded The Flag, he was freebasing approximately $7,000 to $8,000 worth of cocaine per week. On one of the songs on the album, “Free to Be Me,” Rick actually announced that he was on coke. “I’m up, down, middle of my room,” he sang in the first verse. “Someone got excited, someone dropped the spoon / A joke, a smoke, I’m crawling on my knees / I’m feeling paranoia, someone rock it please / A place, a space, any box will do / Just don’t let the sun in, please, until I’m through.”
There was no actual flag pictured on the cover of The Flag. Instead, Rick stands looking straight ahead with his arms folded, posing in front of a rectangular background divided into red and black portions and bordered in green. He wears black pants and a black top with a cross around his neck, his hair is cut short, and a dangling earring hangs from his left ear. He told an interviewer he thought short hair made him look sober. Rick said the flag referred to in the album’s title wasn’t the US flag, but “the freak flag” instead, and that the freak flag’s colors were red, green, and black. The word freak often referred to drug users, but red, green, and black were also the colors of Kwanzaa and the Pan-African flag.
Later, however, Rick told Sharon Davis for her book Motown: The History that the red, green, and black flag was “a free flag for the people, not just a country.” Green represents “Mother Earth, the planet which we are destroying and which we must save. The red stands for passion and/or love and also for blood, which must not be shed. The black is alpha-omega, ying-yang, the beginning and the end.”
The Flag may have been Rick’s most unoriginal album, and the critics came out in force to denounce it. He was accused of ripping off its basic album jacket design concept, as well as the colors of “the freak flag,” from a banner on the cover of Funkadelic’s 1978 album One Nation Under a Groove. The only apparent similarity between Rick’s album cover and the Funkadelic banner, however, was their colors.
On the back of his own album jacket, Rick was standing in front of another red, black, and green rectangle, this time wearing a black headwaiter-type jacket decorated with two vertical rows of three silver buttons and long, white-stringed epaulets. Unlike most headwaiters, however, Rick wasn’t wearing a shirt beneath the jacket, revealing a V-shaped view of his middle chest. The cross remained around his neck. He wore studded bracelets on his wrist and held his right hand to his forehead as if saluting an invisible flag. At both the beginning and end of the album, Rick and his background singers urged listeners in song to “Wave your freak flag! Wave your freak flag! Rally round the red, black, and green.”
Rick later disputed the accusation that he had stolen the flag idea from Funkadelic by arguing that the flag the album referred to was neither the Funkadelic flag nor the freak flag, but the US flag. He also implied that the US flag was linked to the album because it represented a country whose existence was being endangered by the possibility of nuclear war, the subject he explored in “Funk in America/Silly Little Man.”
The Flag had another, more serious problem, however. So far, Rick and Motown had done very well at choosing the singles they traditionally would release early to build public anticipation for an upcoming album. This time, however, the company chose “Sweet and Sexy Thing” for early release because it was a rocking love song that sounded like many of Rick’s previous hits—but Rick wanted “Funk in America/Silly Little Man” released first.
All seemed well for a while. Black stations played “Sweet and Sexy Thing” often enough to push it to number 6 on the Billboard R&B singles chart by May 1986 and keep it on the chart for fifteen weeks. (The tune didn’t make the pop chart.) But this time the record’s intended audience didn’t react as expected. They listened to it on the radio but by and large refused to buy it. “Sweet and Sexy Thing” became a “turntable hit,” a disc that makes it on the air but not at the store. Of 77,100 copies of the single sent to stores for sale, 44,615 were returned, giving “Sweet and Sexy Thing” sales of about thirty-two thousand copies, far from being either sweet or sexy.
Motown then released a second single from The Flag, “Forever and a Day,” and promoted it to radio stations as a follow-up to “Sweet and Sexy Thing.” “Forever and a Day” did even worse, however. Many radio stations refused to play it, and it never charted. According to testimony by Motown executive Alvin “Skip” Miller during the Motown Record Corporation v. Mary Jane Girls court case, radio stations said they wouldn’t play “Forever and a Day” and other songs on The Flag album because the album “wasn’t up to the type of quality that Rick James was known for.”
Discouraged by the reception given “Sweet and Sexy Thing” and “Forever and a Day,” Motown refused to release a third or fourth single from The Flag as the label had for all of Rick’s—and both of the Mary Jane Girls’—previous albums. In particular, Motown execs refused a direct request from Rick that they release “Funk in America/Silly Little Man.” Because that song could have been seen as a denunciation of then��President Ronald Reagan, it might actually have increased the album’s sales—especially among black people, who were mostly anti-Reagan.
In a second controversial move, Motown also cut its promotional spending on The Flag album to the bone, spending a total of $56,743 on it. That sum was a mere drop in the record bin compared to the $402,816 the company had paid to promote Glow just the year before, the $468,498 it had spent on his Cold Blooded LP, and the $834,260 it lavished on promoting the Mary Jane Girls’ album Only Four You in 1985. Rick later argued that the large sums the company poured into promoting those discs were what made them more popular than The Flag. The album sold only 94,697 copies from its release date of May 20, 1986, through mid-1988.
People magazine called The Flag one of the worst albums released in 1986 and described it as a “half-mast performance that nobody is likely to salute” and an “over-embellished façade” that could not hide the fact that Rick was “creatively becalmed.” Rick, of course, disagreed. He wrote in The Confessions of Rick James that he needed to “express his views, even if it put [his] career at stake” and that he needed to “compose for [him], not for Motown.”
The Flag rose to number 16 on the Billboard R&B album chart and stayed on the chart for seventeen weeks, but only managed to reach number 95 on the pop album chart. Motown lost $1,053,711 on the project, and Rick’s royalty account with the company soon ran up a deficit of $896,616, partly because he’d demanded and received an advance payment of $1.2 million for the album. He’d always insisted on large advances from Motown, and the company had acceded to his demands because in most cases his albums, once released, made more in royalties for Rick than the company had advanced him.
Not this time. Except for “Funk in America/Silly Little Man,” the contents of The Flag went mostly unnoticed. The Los Angeles Times called the song “Slow and Easy (Interlude)” a “teasingly effective type of love/sex ballad” but went on to say Rick could probably have tossed off the song in his sleep. (They added that the rest of the album “could just be tossed out, period.”) The combination of sensual lyrics with sensual music in this song makes it one of Rick’s erotic classics, however, and shows how effective he could be using no pornographic lines whatsoever.
As his recording career declined, Rick also expressed discouragement with moviemaking. He continued to talk about doing films but didn’t “plan on doing a Sidney Poitier trip.” He said, “I only want to do the things I know I can do and make them believable.” Nevertheless, he never really dropped the idea. “I’m not really an actor, but I think I could have fun” doing movies, he told an interviewer in 1986.
In a 2002 interview with the A.V. Club, Rick blamed his failure to become a moviemaker in the 1980s on drugs. He said, “I was doing so many drugs in those times that there were a lot of things that I was working on that I just kind of displaced.” If a project “didn’t have much to do with music,” he said, “I would get involved with it and then kind of drop it.”