Yeah, I was that dick. You know, the dick whose unvarying response to Boy George’s “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” was “Yes!” But not because he wore makeup and a dress. I was fine with that. It was because, well, poor George sounded like such a defenseless wuss.
But I turned that “Yes!” into a “You go, girl!” a long time ago, and my typical response to hearing Culture Club on the radio nowadays is giddy excitement. Such frothy musical entertainment! What a beat! And those pasty-faced, Smoky Robinson Lite vocals! You would have to be a MONSTER to want to hurt crooning milksop B.G., even if he did seem dead set on hurting both himself and others during a decades-long Lost Weekend that saw him assaulting innocent Norwegians, abusing every drug under the sun, and doing a skirt-hem-dirtying stint of community service at the New York City Department of Sanitation.
But let’s not allow Boy George’s very public personal problems cloud Culture Club’s myriad contributions to Western Civilization, which are convincingly set out on 1987 best-of compilation This Time–The First Four Years. It has all the hits! And all the hits Culture Club wish had been hits! Including “The War Song,” in which everybody’s favorite cross-dressing misanthrope writes off the human race with the words “People are stupid”! How did that one not climb to the Top of the Pops?
Culture Club specialized in lightweight pop confections composed of equal parts New Wave and blue-eyed soul; they avoided the frigid constraints of synth-pop and by so doing succeeded in emanating real warmth, even if was of the D. Bowie “plastic soul” variety. Just listen to the crooning on “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me.” Boy George sucks you in before the band even kicks in and he never lets up. And the rest of the band has the good sense to let his vocals stand front and center throughout. Doesn’t hurt, either, that the melody is one in a million.
Perfect pop product takes hard work, but it has to seem effortless, and Culture Club sound like they’re hardly trying on such songs as “Karma Chameleon.” Boy George may be a man without convictions, but somebody in the band possessed the good old-fashioned horse sense to know that what the song needed was a whole lot of harmonica, and that Judd Lander, a former member of Merseybeat group the Hideaways, was just the guy to play it. And the same goes for his turn on “Church of the Poison Mind,” whose ingenious mating of Boy George and Helen “Fiery Tonsils” Terry lends it the timeless gloss of a lost Northern Soul Classic.
And the hits just keep on coming. “Miss Me Blind” is a giddy dance floor whirl with echoes of disco’s golden age; “Time (Clock of the Heart)” boasts a big bad bass line and evokes memories of cheesy seventies soul. “It’s a Miracle” is a small miracle and proof that true genius lies in keeping things simple. As for “I’ll Tumble 4 Ya,” it’s all trumpet and ersatz steel drums and works just fine as a slice of commercialized calypso. Move over Harry Belafonte!
This Time is top-heavy with songs from Culture Club’s first two LPs–1982’s Kissing to Be Clever and 1983’s Colour by Numbers–for the most obvious of reasons: a precipitous drop-off in quality beginning with 1984’s Waking Up with the House on Fire and extending through 1986’s aptly entitled From Luxury to Heartache. In point of fact, this 14-track compilation includes only one song from each of their last two LPs.
Which is fine by me; better this lopsided beast than a compilation that included sub par cuts from the later LPs just to balance things out. As it is, the pair of cuts cherry-picked from the band’s last two albums simply don’t stand up to the Club’s earlier material. Colour by Numbers’ “Black Money” was’t a hit (it wasn’t even released as a single), but thanks to George, Terry and one sleazy saxophone it stands head and shoulders above both “Move Away” (soulless drum machine dance from From Luxury to Heartache) and the aforementioned “The War Song” (feckless protest from Waking Up with the House on Fire).
As for why you should buy this LP: You believe in fun, don’t you? And you believe in getting the biggest bang for your entertainment buck, don’t you? And you don’t want to see Boy George live out his golden years in bedbug bedsit squalor, do you? Culture Club gave us so much. Time to give a little back.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B+
