His legacy continues to inspire new generations of artists to get their super freak on.
—Kickin’ CD insert, 2014
Rick left behind the relatively small sum of approximately $210,000, according to court documents filed the year he died. He also left an impressive and ongoing musical legacy, combining the funk of George Clinton, the sound of R&B, and his own bold lyrics into a unique sound of his own. The number of albums and songs he created, plus the number of vocalists and groups he sang with, produced, mentored, and influenced is overwhelming. The Philadelphia Inquirer is not alone in stating flatly that Rick has influenced virtually everyone doing R&B and hip-hop today. He is also one of the most sampled musicians in the history of American popular music.
Rick’s influence was obvious even during his lifetime. He claimed he heard portions of his work utilized in forty songs recorded by others. MC Hammer’s sampling of the bass line from “Super Freak” was the most obvious example, but Hammer also utilized portions of “Give It to Me Baby” on his album Let’s Get It Started. The B-Fats sampled portions of “You and I” in their underground hit “Woppit,” and LL Cool J, Ashanti, the Fresh Prince, and numerous others have cherry-picked and sampled portions of Rick’s songs.
Mary J. Blige sampled Rick, among others, on My Life, which became 1995’s most successful R&B album. Salt-N-Pepa, whose name inadvertently echoed that of one of Rick’s early groups, took parts of some of his tunes for their album Brand New. The Lo Fidelity Allstars sampled Rick in 1999, as did Jay-Z on his song “I Just Wanna Love U” in 2000. Among the many other artists to sample him were Jennifer Lopez, Busta Rhymes, Dr. Dre, Kriss Kross, EPMD, DJ Jazzy Jeff, Mya, DJ Quik, Keith Murray, and Afrika Bambaataa.
Some musicians just recycled his songs. Shaquille O’Neal lip-synched to “Fire and Desire.” And Ol’ Dirty Bastard rerecorded “Cold Blooded,” although his version of this tune was denounced as “agonized, painfully off-key and misbegotten.”
On their album The Hard Way, 213 (Snoop Dogg, Warren G, and Nate Dogg) sang “Mary Jane” and a song called “Groupie Luv” in an apparent tribute to Rick. Snoop, on his own, proclaimed himself “the modern day Rick James” on his tune “Pass It Pass It.”
Even the groups Rick created begat successor groups, with the Mary Jane Girls inspiring, among others, the Pussycat Dolls and the Spice Girls.
Part of Rick’s legacy was the staying power of his song “Super Freak.” Although one Washington Post writer called it “a paean of praise to a nymphomaniac backstage groupie who is waiting to ingest cocaine and engage in freaky group and oral sex with the singer and his friends,” he also noted that grandmothers and great aunts are still dancing to this song at wedding receptions.
What used to be called moral standards have been lowered considerably in the past thirty years, which may account partly for the vast popular acceptance of “Super Freak.” But the Washington Post speculated that the song’s extended popularity is due more to the fact that the music, lyrics, and performance have worked so exquisitely well together that they’ve burned the song into the global pop consciousness, leaving its naughty intention behind and becoming something else, something permanent. As the Post opined, “If you leave this world remembered for one pop song, then you’ve left it in grand enough style.”
Many musicians have gone so far as to record their own memorials to the song “Super Freak” or to the Super Freak himself. On Robyn’s self-titled 2005 album, she put Rick and herself in lofty company with the line “She sucker-punched Einstein, outsmarted Ali, and even out-super-freaked Rick James.” Then there’s the 1998 song “Rick James” by Jude, which starts out with an oral sex scene and includes the oft-repeated line, “Rick James was the original Super Freak.” French Stewart, the costar of 3rd Rock from the Sun, sang the song “Evil Dick” to the tune of “Super Freak.”
The power of the “Super Freak” song was such that, like a stone thrown into still waters, it kept expanding the definition of “freak” and “super freak” even while Rick was still alive. And after Rick’s death, the term jumped into the literary world.
When Steven D. Levitt and Steven J. Dubner published their bestselling book on rogue economics in 2005, they didn’t call it Rogue Economics, they called it Freakonomics. And when they published their follow-up book in 2009, they titled it SuperFreakonomics. Asked by an interviewer if using that title was in any way a homage to Rick, they replied, “The title may show bad taste—on any number of levels—but we just couldn’t help ourselves.” The Toronto Globe and Mail referred to the two authors as “Rick James–riffin’ super freaks.”
Other book reviewers pointed out that the relationship went deeper still than the title. For instance, when Levitt and Dubner were asked if their book was one “you don’t take home to mother,” a reference to a line in “Super Freak,” they responded, “As for Mom: If she’s easily offended, you might ask her to skip Chapter 1.” In that chapter, titled “How Is a Street Prostitute like a Department-Store Santa,” they argue in part that high-end call girls earn great money and are often treated better than wives. As economists, but surely not as moralists, they then go on to recommend this lifestyle to women who like sex and dislike marriage. Rick would certainly have agreed.
He would also have agreed with the authors’ assertion that driving home drunk is many times safer than walking home drunk. If fact, there’s nothing in any of Levitt and Dubner’s books that Rick would not instantly have agreed with, which, aside from their similar titles, could be why their book and his song will be linked for decades in the public mind.
And Rick had his own literary legacy as well. While in jail he wrote an autobiography titled The Confessions of Rick James: Memoirs of a Super Freak. Published in 2007, three years after Rick’s death, it ends with his marriage to Tanya in 1997. Noted music author David Ritz, after interviewing Rick on several occasions, rewrote the book as Glow in cooperation with Rick’s estate. In that 2014 book, writing mostly as Rick, Ritz added material to the narrative, including a discussion of Rick’s 1997 album Urban Rapsody.
Another part of Rick’s musical legacy was the use made of his songs in commercials: “Give It to Me Baby,” for instance, was the soundtrack for a Burger King commercial in the late 1990s. And then there’s the use of Rick’s tunes in church. Yes, you read that right. In 2015, as the drive to legalize marijuana in the US gained momentum, the New York Times reported that the First Church of Cannabis had been organized in Indianapolis. According to the paper, the first hymn performed at the church’s first service was “Mary Jane.” Shocked parishioners at other churches should remember that one of the lines in the song asserts that marijuana “takes you to Paradise.”
Even Rick’s unreleased tunes are still considered valuable. Sources say that still in the vaults of one record company or another are at least two rock ’n’ roll albums by Rick, another unreleased collection called McBooty’s Bump and Grind Revue, and other musical material.
But all this is nothing compared to the inspiration Rick provided to present-day pop musicians of all stripes and likely will provide to musicians of the future. Most obviously, he inspired numerous people to write songs about his and their struggle with drugs. Many musicians, inspired both by Rick’s alleged crimes against women and by Chappelle’s Show, have written about Rick as a bitch-slap artist. In her song “Rick James,” Keyshia Cole uses the line “Slap the bitch, I’m Rick James.” Common’s remix of Jadakiss’s song “Why” progresses beyond this to ask the interesting question, “Why ain’t Rick James remembered for classic hits? / Why do we remember Rick for smackin’ a bitch?”
Rick’s “I’m Rick James, bitch” statement was referenced in many songs, including Frank Ocean’s tune “Bitch I Think I’m Tom Petty” and Madonna’s 2014 song “Bitch I’m Madonna” (featuring Nicki Minaj). On the album Be by Common, the song “Chi-City” includes the line “What you rappin’ for? To get fame? To get rich? I slap a nigga like you, and tell ’em ‘Rick James, bitch.’”
Other musicians were inspired by Rick’s productivity and musical drive. McDuffie Funderberg of the Mary Jane Girls hit it right on the head when she said the very first thing she would ask Rick if he returned from the grave would be, “What’s the next song going to be?”
Rick’s pornographic themes and lyrics also have remained influential. Missy Elliott certainly imitated Rick when she named two of her own tunes “One Shot Man” and “Lick Shots.” She underlined her musical debt to him when she told one interviewer in 2002 that because records that year were “all about paying bills and relationships . . . we decided to take the sound and the lyrics back to the sexy side, back to the 1980s, when you had records from Rick James.”
Beck, in his songs “Sexx Laws” and “Nicotine & Gravy,” was also said to evoke the “sex beat of Rick James.” The song “Get Up” by 50 Cent includes the line “Rick James would have said she a brick house / Or 50 should go home and see what that bitch ’bout,” thus also invoking the title of a song by Rick’s fellow Motown superstar Lionel Richie and his fellow Commodores.
Rick’s pornographic influence has spread well beyond North America. A Washington Post foreign correspondent reported that at Brazil’s funk parties, “a frenzied crowd of thousands grind to a female funk singer moaning a song that would make Rick James blush.” Rick has also influenced British vocalists Teish O’Day and Omar and many other singers in other countries.
Although Rick himself appeared in only one movie, his look and the attitudes he struck have influenced numerous screenwriters and actors. Characters obviously meant to be him, or resemble him, began popping up in movies before his death and continue to do so. For instance, Eddie Murphy in the movie Vampire in Brooklyn dresses like Rick and occasionally wears a Rick James wig. Or, as the Toronto Star put it, Murphy “turns into Rick James” in this film.
Even Rick’s style of dress has inspired others. A New Zealand newspaper, the Christchurch Press, while reviewing a Busta Rhymes performance, noted that Rhymes’s outfit included a broad-brimmed bolero hat with little red pom-poms, and wrote, “Rick James, we have located your old outfit.”
Rick’s hedonistic lifestyle is also still in the news. A bulldog named Rick James won the Instagram contest sponsored by the Vancouver Courier in March 2015. According to the newspaper, “just like his namesake, Rick-the-bulldog’s life has been a non-stop party of excess and fame and was at the center of a messy love triangle with Hope and Camilla, two neighborhood bitches that love his confident swagger.” The paper also noted that Rick finds it hard to leave the house without bumping into his female fans.
Even Rick’s criminal career, appropriately intertwined with his musical career, is being imitated. Two men robbed the Indiana Members Credit Union in Indianapolis in September 2015, each of them disguised as different versions of Rick, one of them wearing long hair and the other wearing beaded braids. A USA Today network newscaster couldn’t resist asking on air if one of the Ricks demanded the money with the phrase “Give It to Me Baby.” She also suggested the other Rick was attempting to adopt the flower-power look that the real Rick adopted on the cover of his Wonderful album, showing her in-depth knowledge of the real Rick’s musical career.
In what may be the ultimate tribute, in October 2015, when Miley Cyrus played the role of Miley Cyrustein at a spoof/charity Bar Mitzvah for actor James Franco, she sang “Super Freak” while wearing a thong leotard. Rick would definitely have approved.
In the future, Rick may live on in different ways. Jeff Jampol, who manages Rick’s estate, told an interviewer in 2012 that he was exploring the development of a Rick James hologram, a 3-D character that could walk right up to a viewer, look him in the eye, sing right at him, and then turn around and walk away. Working with Jampol is the organization that developed the Tupac Shakur hologram seen at California’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in 2012, some fifteen years after Shakur’s death. Various observers at different levels of sobriety were shocked and amazed by Shakur’s lifelike reappearance and his interactions with other performers.
Rick inspired and entertained millions of people, dramatically influenced the lives of his Stone City Band members and his other protégés for the better even while cheating some of them, and definitely hurt a few individuals along the way. The epitaph on Rick’s grave doesn’t really sound like him. A better epitaph would have quoted a 1979 interview in which he talked about the people who wished they could change places with him, and how they always talked about “the money, the women and the fast cars.” He told the interviewer, “I wish they could all have it for one day and see what it really means.”
Asked if he’d trade everything he’d ever achieved for some happiness, he responded, “Immediately!! Immediately!! To be content and to wake up happy—that has to be a magical experience.”