Track Listing

1. Word Up
2. Candy
3. Back And Forth
4. Don't Be Lonely
5. She's Mine
6. Fast, Fierce & Funny
7. You Can Have The World

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #53590 in Music
• Released on: 2002-07-25
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .19 pounds
• Running time: 35 minutes

CD Description
The most inescapable funk single of 1986 was Cameo's brilliant "Word Up!", a perfect fusion of gimmicky production--Larry Blackmon's distinctive lead vocal was recorded through a transistor radio to give it a curiously distant, almost robotic quality--and an almost painfully funky groove. Followingit with the nearly as perfect "Candy" is by itself enough to make WORD UP Cameo's best studio album by far, but the other five extended funk-rockers are up to those high standardsas well. More than any funk band who had been releasing albums before Prince blew up in the early '80s--and that includes the P-Funk crew--Cameo understood how to update their sound without losing their essential funk, adding synths and drum machines to their bass-driven rhythms and coming up with minor masterpieces like the self-evident "Fast, Fierce, and Funny" in the process.

Customer Reviews

The album that defined "cool" in the 1980s
1986 was quite a year. I was busy perfecting an advanced level of high school nerdiness that future generations would never be able to equal, and Cameo was releasing what was, to me, the coolest song I had ever heard in my life. Word Up was huge; not since the heyday of Fonzie had I encountered such a concentration of coolness in anything. Everybody loved this song, everybody played this song, and everybody inevitably introduced the word Owwwww into his/her vocabulary. Then the song Candy was released, another great song that increased the shelf life of Larry Blackmon’s trademark Owwwww for several more months. The way I saw it, you couldn’t even pretend to be cool without owning this album. At first glance, you look and see only seven songs and wonder what the deal is here, but let me rationalize this seeming weakness of the CD by explaining that the album is 35 minutes long, with two songs over five minutes long and one spanning an excess of six minutes; thus, while it’s still a relatively short album, it is not “too short” by any means (especially for its time). While none of the other tracks comes close to equaling the power of Word Up, this is still a great album all the way around. The only thing I knew about funk at this time was that Rick James’ Superfreak was the funkiest funk around. I knew nothing about Cameo’s emergence in the late 70s and their successful adaptation to the musical changes of the 80s, not only surviving where other funk bands fell by the wayside but prospering like nobody’s business. I guess this can be called hip-hop music; all I know is that this was bold, cutting edge stuff to my young little mind. Now, I can appreciate this album in altogether new ways, and I must say it’s still all kinds of cool. She’s Mine is a great song, with Blackmon telling some unwelcome stranger that he doesn’t appreciate him making moves on his special lady. Featuring a rap-like section and hard-driving beat, it’s vintage Cameo. Back and Forth is another beat-rich track with an infectious groove sound. Don’t Be Lonely is something of a slower yet still quite funky little track. Fast, Fierce, and Funny has a cool bass bridge voiceover and a steady beat that you may struggle to get out of your head as it explains to you that money isn’t everything in this world. Somewhat ironically, the final track You Can Have the World is an empowering song communicating the fact that you can have whatever you want in life, including wealth, if you just get up off your back side and work for it. For me, Cameo’s Word Up! is an indelible part of the 1980s and my coming of age, but this music is by no means old and out-of-date in the twenty-first century. Something this cool never really goes out of style.

Word Up! Everybody say
This album epitomised all that was funky with Cameo, from their humble beginings when they were a 7 piece outfit to the later incarnation when it was just the 3 and you can't forget the "Cod piece" Blackmon wore that with pride and it often was commented on in the papers. but apart from that this CD is pure 80's funk. the coolest of the cool, you had to have this CD to be anyone. Some of the biggest singles of the 80's are on this album. Buy it, play it and say "awwwwwwwh"