They call me��Loosey, ’cause I'm so loose I make all the right moves, when I seduce.
—“Loosey’s Rap,” performed by Rick James and Roxanne Shanté,
written by Rick James (1988)
Rick signed with Warner Brothers in July 1987 and moved to that company while his suit against Motown was continuing.
Born from what Rick saw as his dual escapes—from Motown and, he innocently believed, from drug and alcohol addiction—his next album, 1988’s Wonderful, reflected what he thought his life had become. Rick told an AP interviewer he was “really excited” about finally getting a chance to do a non-Motown album and that those who listened to his next LP would hear “a joy in the album that I haven’t had for years.” Part of the joy was the result of his recent conversion to born-again Christianity, which had been inspired by a born-again girlfriend from his recent past.
Although Motown had paid him $1 million per album, he said he was flattered that Warner agreed to pay him $800,000 for Wonderful. He also was pleased that Warner would release his albums on their Reprise subsidiary label, on which they’d released Jimi Hendrix’s records. There was a problem, though. Rick wanted to make an album of Christian songs for Warner Brothers, but that company wanted an old-style punk-funk Rick James album instead. After weighing his newfound born-again Christianity against his love of money, Rick caved to the lure of lucre.
Once he had made that decision, he remembered one of his tried-and-true ways of making money from an album was singing about sex. He also knew the popularity of rappers had been growing and that women were as popular as ever. He decided, therefore to collaborate with nineteen-year-old Roxanne Shanté, the first female rapper to make a record, to produce what turned out to be the most popular song on the album, “Loosey’s Rap.”
This song brings to full fruition the use of the word “freaky” to mean “fuckable.” Rick introduces Loosey as a “freaky thing” with long legs and juicy lips. Then Loosey, after identifying herself as a “super freak,” raps about how great she is at sex and seduction and asks a listener “How would you like for me to freak you?”
After listening to this song, a Los Angeles Times reviewer called Shanté “tougher than a truckload of leather-wearing Mary Jane Girls” and touted her “B-girl boasting, which she sounds fully capable of backing up.” A Dallas Morning News reviewer accurately described the song as a “lean, scorchy and hypnotic tune with a dead-on bass line and a hip Roxanne rap.”
Although Shanté made the track sizzle, she didn’t appear in the inevitable video for the song, probably because she was less attractive than the lanky supermodel types who dominated the video striding around in their undergarments. While certainly sexy, the models probably disappointed some of Rick’s male fans by wearing lingerie that mostly protected their modesty. They also barely touched each other or a fully dressed Rick and mimicked no sex acts whatsoever, making the video resemble a soft-porn fashion shoot.
In at least two cutaway scenes while Rick was singing, various supermodels, all but two white, got their hair done and applied bright red lipstick while a tiger on a leash growled nearby. One model wore an American Revolutionary era soldier’s uniform with the jacket open to reveal her black bra. Two of the models, one wearing a dress and the other a negligee, appeared to be trying to wash their hair in a shower stall. They started squirting each other with a hand-held shower attachment, and ended up shooting mouthfuls of water at each other. One of them was kneeling while the other was standing, causing frissons of delight among thousands of imaginative viewers. MTV, always in character, refused to play the video, but, amazingly, it aired on Playboy’s Hot Rocks, a Playboy Channel show.
“Loosey’s Rap,” Rick’s first single release on Reprise, hit number 1 on the Billboard R&B singles chart and stayed on the chart for sixteen weeks, becoming Rick’s first number 1 hit on that chart since “Cold Blooded” five years before. Showing how accustomed Rick had become to being nearer the middle of the heap than the top, he expressed amazement that “Loosey’s Rap” did so well. “That was a very strange thing for me,” he told J. D. Considine of the Baltimore Sun.“I never thought it was going to be a number one record; I really didn’t.”
Motown was shocked and dismayed. After years as No-Hit Rick at Motown, Rick had scored a number one record on the R&B chart with his first release for another firm.
Because two of Rick’s three favorite things were sex and money, it was appropriate that the other outstanding song on Wonderful was called “So Tight.” Most listeners thought “So Tight” had a sexual connotation, but they were wrong. The song was about money, and referred to the tight budgets of ghetto dwellers. Rick made that eminently clear beginning with the song’s first verse: “You got no money in your pocket / No shoes on your feet / Every place that you go / You can’t afford to eat.” The song was also about Rick’s opinion of Motown’s financial treatment of its artists. He made this clear when, in thanking people on the inside album sleeve, he told Motown, “Don’t Be So Tight!” apparently referring to the millions in royalties he believed the company owed him.
After recording “So Tight,” Rick said he wasn’t going to record any more songs with topical themes, because listeners already knew what their problems were, and the songs weren’t going to solve those problems. Rick may have been disappointed because his earlier protest songs, “Funk in America/Silly Little Man” on The Flag, and “Ghetto Life” and “Mr. Policeman” on Street Songs, hadn’t made any discernable impact on the world.
Another song on Wonderful, “In the Girls’ Room,” really did refer to lesbian sex acts but didn’t go into any detail. The song was actually a cry for justice for a boy caught watching some sexually playful girls through a locker room peephole. The Dallas Morning News called the song “loutish” and “sexist” and pointed out that “In the Girls’ Room” was about a peeping tom, and Rick excused this conduct with the line “Boys will be boys, no need to get annoyed / He was just having fun and got busted.”
“Sexual Luv Affair,” on this album, on the other hand, did live up to its title somewhat, with the L.A. Times calling it a “torcher.” They somewhat paradoxically complimented the song’s “angelic, 1950s-sounding three-part harmony.”
Rick had great expectations for his new LP. “It’s just a very happy album,” Rick told an AP interviewer, adding, “Now is my time. Everything I’ve done up to this point is just a warm up.” His publicist said Wonderful has “gotta be wonderful news for anyone who loves music that shakes the soul, their booty and their preconceptions.” But was it?
Besides being his first non-Motown album in years, Wonderful was a big change for Rick in several other ways. Although the music was still recognizably punk funk, with the Cleveland Plain Dealer describing its sound as “soulful, new-wave,” Rick had thrown heavy smatterings of rap and acid rock into the mix, making the record sound, in part, like a Prince imitation. Rick acknowledged this in a way when he made the basic color of the cover purple.
Rick also had drastically changed his look on the album cover to make himself look more like Prince—or like Louis XIV, depending on your point of view. He’d replaced his shoulder-length braids with a full curly hairstyle, and changed out of his gladiator garb and other deliberately shocking outfits and into a floral-print suit consisting of a three-quarter-length red-lined floral jacket, long flowered pants, and a flowered hat. Rick wore this look on both sides of Wonderful’s jacket, signifying in part that his new album was going to be a mellow trip. Although Rick wore a twelve-step antidrug, antialcohol emblem around his neck along with his usual cross, LeRoi Johnson attributed his brother’s new costume to “too many drugs.”
Reaction to the album ranged from negative to lukewarm. People magazine denounced it for its “stale grooves and clamorous instrumentation.” The Dallas Morning News, hearing traces of LL Cool J, Keith Sweat, and Prince on the album, quipped about Rick, “If you can’t beat them, incorporate them,” and pilloried Rick for going so far as to emulate Prince’s strange spelling. Quoting Rick’s thank-you to Teena Marie from the album’s liner notes—“Ur a soulful bird that rests in my heart 4ever”—the paper asked, “How much more work does it take to spell out ‘you are’ and ‘for?’”
When Rick heard he was being accused of imitating Prince, he responded with a spectacular triangle shot aimed at his critics, Motown, and Prince. “I was wearing ruffles and frills before Prince,” he told an interviewer. “Rick was Rick long before Prince came along.” He then explained the reason he was dressed like a butterfly on the album cover: “I was trapped in a cocoon at Motown, but at last I’m free.”
He also said he was glad to be working at Warner Brothers, calling it “even more exciting” than Motown. Citing its star vocalists by name, including Al B. Sure!, Club Nouveau, Morris Day, and Prince, he added, “There’s room for all of us to work together.”
Some fans and reviewers were just glad to have Rick back, no matter whom he might be imitating. As one reviewer said, in Rick’s world “the party is always just beginning and freaky fun is just around the corner.” Rick proclaimed, in fact, that “Good old funk” was back.
“People got to have it in their lives,” he told author Mike Sager. “There’s too much thick shit out there . . . too many rappers out there talking about death and Mac-10’s [machine gun pistols] and all that shit. What happened to the fun, man? What happened to the funk?”
Released on June 28, 1988, Wonderful only made it to number 148 on the pop album chart, but after appearing on Billboard’s R&B album chart on July 23, 1988, it stayed on that chart for nineteen weeks, peaking at number 12.
This was nice, but unfortunately, according to Warner Bros., the album sold only 195,978 copies through December 31, 1988, making it the third-worst-selling album in Rick’s career. It lost the company more than half a million dollars, just about the amount Warner Brothers had spent promoting the album. Rick attributed the failure of Wonderful to a relapse into his old habits. He said, “[I was] spending my time getting high and having women running in and out. . . . It was very decadent. Everybody was smoking crack.” Competition from other artists, including Bobby Brown and New Kids on the Block, was another problem.
The real significance of Wonderful in Rick’s career was the release of “Loosey’s Rap.” But although it became a hit, it didn’t seem to make Rick any happier than he had been previously. Mike Tyson, the former heavyweight boxing champion, wrote in his 2013 book, Undisputed Truth, that he was sitting outside a hotel on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles in 1988, after Wonderful had dropped. With him was seventeen-year-old actor Alfonso Ribeiro, who played the character Carlton Banks on the NBC sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Rick drove up, looked at Ribeiro, said “Aren’t you an actor?” and then hit him before Ribeiro could say anything. “Gimme that fucking beer,” Rick then said. He then grabbed Ribeiro’s beer and drank it.
Despite Rick’s newfound freedom (and financial windfall) from Motown, his downward spiral was continuing.