from the LP Juicy Fruit, Epic Records, 1983When Dâm Funk recently stated in an interview that he felt Mtume’s Juicy Fruit was one of the most prolific and important albums of the last thirty years, he wasn’t kidding; granted, this style of sophisticated boogie is exactly the type of sound Funk aspires to in his own career, so I won’t go as far as him in describing the overall significance of this album, but Mtume most definitely brings the funk for us here. Coming off like some robot who composed an ode to the fluidity with which humans can move their bodies, this whole LP is unadulterated proof that being slick & being loose are, indeed, not mutually exclusive, and this vocoder-heavy track flawlessly lays out that dialectic for us; the blazing, Hazel-ian electric guitar solo at the very end (care of Ed ‘Tree’ Moore) comes out of nowhere and kicks my ass every time.
