I was born to funk and roll in the Big Time.
—“Big Time,” by Rick James (1980)
After saying for years that he wanted to experiment with music and still sell records, Rick felt his time had come. He told the San Francisco Chronicle he wanted the new album, which was released on CD, to appeal to both fifteen-year-old hip-hoppers and forty- to fifty-year-olds.
Although Rick had never been a rap fan, there was quite a bit of rap on Urban Rapsody, much of it by rappers he invited to join him in recording the album, including Neb Luv of Da 5 Footaz, Rappin’ 4-Tay, Lil’ Cease, and Snoop Dogg. He said he’d begun to appreciate the genre in prison when younger inmates turned him on to Snoop, also a former jailbird, and that he was into rappers who played their own instruments, like Snoop and Scarface. Rick also sought and received assistance from R&B singers Bobby Womack and Charlie Wilson, former leader of the Gap Band.
Telling interviewers he hoped his new album would bridge the gap between old-school music and hip-hop, Rick added Womack’s singing to Snoop’s rapping on one of the tunes on Urban Rapsody, “Player’s Way.” Neb Luv rapped on “It’s Time” and “Favorite Flava,” and was praised by one critic for her “seductive performance.” Rappin’ 4-Tay, who performed on the album’s title tune, was, like Rick, a former prison inmate. A criminal record was the preferred rap image, of course, and Rick was positioning himself and his new album wisely.
Because he had criticized rappers as nonmusicians for years, some saw Urban Rapsody as Rick’s semi-surrender to the rap community. New Times magazine and others accused him of selling out. Rick’s answer to the criticism certainly did nothing to refute that accusation. He said he hadn’t wanted rappers touching his music, “but then when [he] saw what kind of money [he] was making from them, [he] said ‘Never mind.’” He was undoubtedly thinking mainly of MC Hammer and “U Can’t Touch This.”
Somewhat touchingly, Rick dedicated Urban Rapsody in part to his “Homeys” in Folsom: “Alfred (Bubba) Johnson, Rodney Napier, Rob Bunns, Leonard (Mousy) Fulgram, Payne (N.Y.), Marion Miller, Garry (Red) Eccher, Dewayne (Rahim) Richardson, Country, Freddie Jackson and Loapy.”
Rick also dedicated the album to “all U punk-ass C.O.’s [Correction Officers] who tried to keep me down,” telling them that “if you ever need a job, you can always wash the tires on my Rolls Royce . . . !”
“Somebody’s Watching You” starts out with re-created news reports about Rick being released and goes on to describe his prison experience. One reviewer called it “an honest, introspective look at Rick’s incarceration and its aftermath.” The Washington Post called the lyrics angry and paranoid, however. Referring to the Folsom correction officers, Rick sang, “Look at all the little piggies standing in a row, waiting in the shadows for a brother just to blow [lose control].”
Rick also hoped to attract some of his old fans to Urban Rapsody by including some old-style porn numbers on the new album, such as “Player’s Way,” “So Soft So Wet” and “Back in You Again.”
“Player’s Way,” the song on which Womack and Snoop join Rick, features a pimp and one of his employees pledging their mutual love. This song alone fully justifies the parental warning on the sticker affixed to the album cover—it actually makes prostitution and pimping sound romantic.
“So Soft So Wet” was Rick’s obvious attempt to catch up with Prince in the porno sweepstakes. Prince’s first album, For You, had contained the song “Soft and Wet,” referring to an excited vagina, which Rick’s song referred to as well. Although Rick initially asks his female partner in “So Soft So Wet” to “open wide” and later refers to their “bodies joined together like the rain and stormy weather,” the two songs are quite different musically.
Rick claimed “So Soft So Wet” was inspired not by Prince but by Tanya, who, Rick said, had sent him some “outrageous” photos while he was in jail. As he wrote in the album’s liner notes, his time in jail with no sex “was a bitch,” and with a “fine ass lady waiting for [him] when [he] got out,” all he had were his fantasies. He said he decided to write his feelings about these photos into this song, saying it described a dream about being between Tanya’s “soft and creamy thighs.” Although Rick wrote that he wrote the song because he didn’t want “2 jack off,” he called the tune a “musical ejaculation.” Beginning with a woman’s sexually excited groans, the tune moves on to Rick’s deeply masculine tones as he sings lines like “yeah, funk me, baby, funk me yeah.”
“Back in You Again,” which Rick recorded with the rapper Lil’ Cease, was another sexy number about Tanya and was recorded specifically for the popular film Money Talks, which starred Chris Tucker and Charlie Sheen. “Favorite Flava” is dedicated to performing cunnilingus on black women. Among the lines in this song are “Can I taste you for a while?” “I like to lick you like a lollipop,” and “Say I can play in your sweet milky way?” Rick said he initially wanted rapper and actress Yo-Yo to rap on “Favorite Flava,” but she was busy. She may have been “busy” because she advocates female empowerment and dislikes sexism. Rick then asked Neb Luv, who, he said, rushed to work with him because he was her family’s favorite artist.
“Turn It Out” includes lines such as “I got a real down girl and she’s on my side / You ought to see her dance with her legs butt wide / Yeah, she doesn’t mind if you look, stop, and stare / She doesn’t give a damn and she just don’t care.” These lines were followed by the chorus, “I love to see her turn it out.” It’s clear that what she was “turning out” was her vagina. When Billboard reviewed “Turn It Out,” it called Rick “a renegade funkster back in serious action” and said “this wholly accessible jam” showed Rick at his absolute best. The song includes the oft-repeated opening and closing line, “Sex-me funk-me music, that’s what I adore.”
In the video of “Turn It Out,” Rick sings the song backed by several male musicians, two sexy female background singers who flip their hair and wink at appropriate moments, and one female dancer, who, while admittedly wearing leather pants and a top, illustrates the lyrics from a distance by spreading her legs as wide as possible and dancing and undulating for the camera. She then crawls toward the camera miming a tiger, appropriately hissing and clawing, before regaining her feet and dancing while the camera lovingly shoots her from her knees up from about three feet away.
In the song itself, Rick avers that “for three long years I couldn’t get a piece, no, couldn’t wait to hit it when I got released.” After noting that the dancing girl is now on his side, he clarifies what he means by “on his side” when he sings that she’s “right lay horizontal with me deep inside.”
One overall assessment was that Urban Rapsody showed Rick bravely struggling for new direction and meaning. Some publications said he had found both, but others, like the Philadelphia Inquirer, insisted Rick “didn’t quite capture the tautness of hip-hop” and called his efforts to sound contemporary “near-painful.” The paper said Urban Rapsody contained overwrought lyrics, refrains that were too simple, and bald attempts at gangsta hip. On the other hand, Vibe magazine called Urban Rapsody the third-most-important album of Rick’s career after Come Get It! and Super Freak.
USA Today said Urban was a “thumping ’90s update” of Rick’s signature sound, rated it his best album since 1983’s Cold Blooded, and awarded it three and a half stars out of four. And the New York Times called the album “brutally honest and autobiographical,” and praised Rick’s “irresistible craftsmanship and spark.”
In an ideal world, “Back in You Again” and the whole Urban Rapsody album would have benefited from publicity about Rick once again being off dope. As he told the New York Times in January 1998, “We would never have done this interview years ago. Back then, I’d be in my room for an hour. Then I’d come out, spend a couple of minutes with you, and go back to my room and smoke cocaine again. You��d be here the whole night and you’d say, ‘We didn’t talk much, but we saw the smoke, the redness in his eyes and the freaks running around buck naked.’”
Rick hadn’t returned to that point yet, but according to former Stone City Band member Daniel LeMelle, Rick was high on cocaine when he recorded “Back in You Again” in 1997. The song wasn’t recorded until the day it was due to be delivered to the Money Talks execs, and, according to LeMelle, before Rick would come downstairs to the recording studio, “he wanted to hit the [coke] pipe again” and “was wasting time looking for a rock [of cocaine].” Impatient with Rick’s seemingly endless coke-caused delays, LeMelle stormed out, although Rick made it to the studio later that day and recorded the song.
As if he were acknowledging the recommencement of his worst habit, Rick sang in “Good Ol Days” about how great life had been at the top until “the devil handed [him] a glass pipe.” He was accompanied by McDuffie Funderberg and Charlie Wilson.
To promote Urban Rapsody Rick reactivated six of the original Stone City Band members to form a new Stone City Band, recruited McDuffie Funderberg from the Mary Jane Girls as one of three backup singers and Teena Marie as a co-performer, and began a twenty-five-city tour in Santa Ana, California, in late September 1997.
From a publicity perspective, the Urban Rapsody tour, Rick’s first in nine years, was brilliantly planned. It was awkward from a geographic perspective, however, because the conditions of his parole required him to return to California three times a week. California is the nation’s most populous state, but even Rick couldn’t draw a large enough crowd to do three concerts a week in the same state for very long. That meant the tour devolved into a series of trips that rarely lasted more than two days. Rick rationalized that this was fine, saying two days a week was a long enough workweek for him. Prison definitely seemed to have mellowed him.
The preview concert at the House of Blues in Los Angeles featured Rick in a white suit, McDuffie Funderberg as a backup singer as well as a solo performer, and Snoop Dogg and Bobby Womack joining Rick on the “Player’s Way” encore. Rick was worried the concert would flop, but it sold out. Numerous celebrities, including Eddie Murphy, turned up to herald Rick’s reentrance into the business. According to Rick’s handlers, the second scheduled concert, at Chicago’s New Regal Theater, also sold out, but at least two of the planned following appearances bombed.
One that should have been a big success, a performance planned for early December 1997 in Rick’s hometown of Buffalo, was canceled after fewer than one thousand fans bought tickets for the three-thousand-seat venue. And when he offered to visit his dropout alma mater, Bennett High School, the school administration told him to stay away.
The quality of Rick’s appearances on the tour became erratic. Before a concert at the DAR Constitution Hall in Washington, DC, in early 1998, he gathered the Stone City Band into his dressing room for a prayer led by McDuffie Funderburg. But the Washington Post reported that when Rick and the band performed “You and I,” the band roared through the tune “while Rick struggled vocally to keep up.” The paper’s reviewer also said that when Rick and McDuffie Funderberg sang “Fire and Desire,” Rick “paid scant attention to the lyrics” and “nearly parodied himself with constant references to drugs and sex.” Rick saved the concert, however, by singing his biggest hits, “Give It to Me” and “Super Freak,” while the audience danced in the aisles, the paper reported.
The same review described this DC crowd as “forty-something black businessmen, reformed hippies, college students, and loyal funkologists.” Rick sometimes wore an all-black ensemble, including a long captain’s coat and dark shades, which was his costume on the cover of the Urban Rapsody CD. Despite his chubbiness, however, he also sometimes donned a jumpsuit, and as one critic put it, “double-chinned super freaks in too-tight jumpsuits tend to invite ridicule.” On the other hand, many of his fans also were probably somewhat heavier than they had been at his pre-prison concerts years earlier.
When Rick played Tramps in Manhattan in 1998, the New York Times reported that even though he hadn’t been a major star since the early 1980s, all he had to do was cue the bass riff of “You and I” or “Bustin’ Out” and the audience would sing along, shouting verses as well as choruses. Every so often, Rick would even stop the band and the fans would keep the songs going. The reviewer pointed out that the songs had been dance music and makeout music in the days before crack and AIDS, probably making listeners in the late 1990s nostalgic for an era of pleasure without risks.
Rick’s voice was coarser at this concert than it had been previously, and a bad hip limited his onstage moves. But in some ways he hadn’t changed. “His onstage subject was lust,” Jon Pareles of the New York Times said, “first exuberant and then in slow motion.” At one point, Rick asked the audience if he could take his time with the songs and then stretched them out by offering detailed instruction in foreplay, while chiding young people for rushing things in the bedroom.
Although he hadn’t been out of jail for very long when the tour began, Rick backed away from the disgust with songs that glorified drugs he’d expressed soon after leaving prison and continued to perform his drug-oriented hits like “Mary Jane.” This time, however, neither he nor the band members backing him would smoke joints onstage, he told one interviewer. (Although he didn’t mention it, Rick enforced this measure to avoid violating his parole.)
Anticipating criticism for once again singing drug songs, he said critics of those tunes just shouldn’t attend his concerts or listen to his music. “So what, I was a cocaine addict,” he said. “So was the mayor [Marion Barry] of Washington, D.C. What are all these people, saints? I’m the only cocaine addict ever?”
He told one interviewer that if Urban Rapsody wasn’t a successful album, then he’d just make another. “I’m grateful to be back where I belong, making the music and expressing the rhythm of my heart.”
Although the critical reaction to the album was generally favorable, Urban Rapsody was not very popular. It rose to number 31 on the Billboard R&B albums chart and remained on the chart for ten weeks. On the Billboard pop albums chart, Urban Rapsody rose only to number 170.
Rick would soon record another album, but now it was time to shore up his social life.