second round
(10) Midnight Oil, “Beds are Burning”
DISINCORPORATED
(2) Lipps, Inc. “Funkytown”
230-213
AND WILL PLAY IN THE SWEET 16
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/17/23.
AMY ROSSI ON “FUNKYTOWN”
It’s nighttime, and two women are standing in a parking lot, one in a Halloween disco dress repurposed for a night out and the other in actual vintage 70s attire. They’re shiny and damp from the humidity and intermittent rain, and also they’re a little buzzed.
The Ford Fiesta they’re waiting for drives by them at a remarkable speed for a parking lot, despite them waving. Despite the fact that the driver is Disco Dress’s boyfriend, not a stranger. They run after him, laughing uncontrollably, and finally they are in the car.
“I need to hear ‘Funkytown’ right now,” the one in the vintage dress says.
*
The first time I heard “Funkytown” was in a commercial—one of those two-minute long deals that accompanied the 90s programming I watched with my sister on her personal television. This was, in fact, how I learned about a lot of music: through osmosis, each song blending into the next in such a way that if I heard the it in the wild, I was still expected the two key lines to melt into something else: Beach baby beach baby there on the sand, rock me gently rock me slowly, I heard my mama cry I heard her pray the night Chicago died—all these hits for $9.99, then audition other great albums from our collection.
Which is to say, I did not actively seek out “Funkytown.” It found me. Eventually it just became a part of my world in a way I did not question, the same way I absorbed state capitals.
The first time I heard someone else invoke the song, a boy in my eighth grade computer class asked a girl if she would take him to Funkytown as a joke, to be mean. I remember reporting the incident back to my sister, equally confused about how a popular boy could also know this old song that we knew and how someone could use the lyrics of “Funkytown” for ill instead of good.
That’s not what Cynthia Johnson was singing about.
*
“Funkytown” was the song of summer in 1980. According to funkytown.com, “The obituaries for disco were being written; Lipps, Inc. put the funeral on hold.” (The four paragraphs on that homepage are so succinct and eloquent that I feel an added pressure in writing this essay—the book on “Funkytown” has been written and I better be damn good if I dare add to it.)
Like all good songs of summer, “Funkytown” broke down walls. You could call it a one-hit wonder, but the emphasis would be on the wonder—because truly, how wondrous to make a song that had something for everyone.
It was steeped in disco but it pulled in other influences too, and it reached number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, number 1 on Billboard’s Hot Disco Singles, and number 2 on Billboard’s Hot Soul Singles. Our writer at funkytown.com tells us the song “knew no musical, racial, or gender barriers,” and it wasn’t beholden to geographic ones either: “Funkytown” was a number 1 hit in Norway, Israel, Canada, Austria, France, New Zealand, Switzerland, and Spain.
For one summer, everyone could go to “Funkytown.”
*
Depending how you punctuate it, the lyrics to “Funkytown” are about five sentences long: The narrator wants to make a move to a town that’s a better fit, one that matches their energy level, they’ve been talking about it, they’ve got to move on, and will you take them there?
It’s laid out as a simple enough problem, but anyone who has ever been in that spot knows how many layers lurk under those words. Anyone who has ever hoped against hope that the problem was where you were, not who you were.
I spent most of my 20s trying to make a move to a town that was right for me. Less than two weeks after graduating college, I left suburban North Carolina for Boston. Much like the narrator of “Funkytown,” I wanted a place that would keep me groovin’ with some energy, and it seemed like everyone around me was segueing artfully from graduation to wedding planning. The city was the place to go.
And for a while it was, until a toxic mix of comfort and malaise settled over my late 20s. I could have this job forever. I could date this guy forever. I could rent this below-market apartment forever.
I started talking about what could be next, mostly to myself, and even then, I could feel how easy it would be for this to be all talk.
Gotta move on, gotta move on.
I ended up in graduate school in Louisiana. The thing is, I knew I was only going to be there for three years, and you can’t really find the Funkytown of your heart if you already have one foot out the door when you get there. And all the things I was running away from were still there, because it turned out the problem with me was me.
I didn’t plan to go home to North Carolina after graduation. I hated saying goodbye every time I visited, it got harder each year, and still, I applied for jobs in Chicago, DC, Boston, Philadelphia.
Instead I ended up back in the Raleigh suburbs, not because I chose to but because my lease in Louisiana was up, I hadn’t found a job, and I was almost 32 years old with nowhere else to go.
*
While I can trace my introduction to “Funkytown” to a commercial, its most persistent presence in my life comes from the video game Dance Central. There was a strikingly long period of time where, if the night went late enough, my sister would fire up the game and be ready to dance until dawn. This is still something that could happen.
My sister is not an incredible dancer, but she is an incredible learner. She would absolutely demolish her Dance Central competition because she was so technically proficient, it didn’t matter what flair, natural ability, or fluid motion the other dancer brought. Heaven help you if you thought you could win a round of “Funkytown.”
*
“Funkytown” was written by Steven Greenberg, a producer and DJ living in Minneapolis. He says he wrote it based on his own desire to get out of a scene that felt too vanilla and break open in the vastness—the funkyness—of New York.
Cynthia Johnson’s voice is the one you associate with the track. She was also living in the Twin Cities and her vocal highlights the tension of the song’s argument: Minneapolis isn’t New York, sure, but this scene also housed a voice and presence like hers, the same scene that gave us Prince; the first band she played in, Flyte Time, would eventually become The Time.
What depth of funky do you miss when you’re busy longing for something else?
*
After I had been living at home for six months, temping in a role similar to one I used to do for twice the money pre-master’s degree, my old job in Boston came open. I applied for it, did the first-round interview, talked to an old colleague about what it would mean to come back.
What it would mean to leave.
And that’s when I realized I had already made my move to the town that was right for me.
I never intended to end up back in the place where my parents lived, the town I’d moved to at age eight. But after a decade of living away from my family, I could not make myself say goodbye again. I knew too much now. My parents were getting older. And anyway, my brother had just moved across the country. It was his turn to go.
It was my turn to stop talking about movin’ and realize I was where I needed to be.
*
Steven Greenberg found opportunities with the success of “Funkytown.” The song has been covered by Kidz Bop, VeggieTales, and Alvin and the Chipmunks, among many others. (The absolute soullessness of the Kidz Bop version uncomfortably highlights the yearning and dissatisfaction in the lyrics that the arrangement and vocal power of the original contrast against.)
The song has appeared in soundtracks for films ranging from History of the World: Part I to Ma to Minions: The Rise of Gru. He calls the song “the daughter he never had” and spent years fighting for its termination rights under copyright law—the right to own his “Funkytown.” It’s very much a part of his life still, as he approves most of the song’s commercial uses.
He lives in Minneapolis.
*
My parents moved recently to live near my brother and his children, something none of us ever planned for when I came back here. Someone asked me what it felt like, to have moved and stayed in part for them and then to have them leave.
Of course I miss them, and I miss my brother and his family. Maybe adulthood is all of us never being in the same place. But I don’t regret my choice to come back for a second.
For a while after my return, my sister was open about the fact that she didn’t trust it, that she didn’t want to believe I was here to stay, a measure of protection to make it easier if I left again.
We’re still making up for the decade we spent living hundreds of miles away from each other, too broke or busy to make a visit happen more than once a year. Now we see each other multiple times a week. Now we even live next door to each other, a passage cut into our shared fence line so we can jaunt through our backyards and get to the other’s house faster. We are the stuff of sitcoms, minus the bite-sized conflicts. Now the trips we want to take and plans we want to make aren’t just things we talk about. It’s been six years, and I’m still here.
*
If you’ve seen a music video for “Funkytown,” you haven’t seen Cynthia Johnson. She is not featured in either version that became popular, nor in the album art. While the opening notes of the song are unmistakable, so is the sound of her voice on the chorus, the warmth and depth after the vocoderized verse, bringing us where we really want to go.
Johnson reunited with members of Flyte Tyme in 2018, as part of a series of concerts kicking off Super Bowl week in Minneapolis. They put their own stamp on it, including mashing up the beat with a groove from Prince’s “Erotic City.” In a video of the performance, Johnson is all joy and green fur coat and glimmering sequins. The concert is outdoors in an actual Minnesota January, and the streets are full.
“This,” she says, “is the new Funkytown.”
*
The truth is, I don’t know how to write about “Funkytown” without writing about my sister, and in fact, I chose this song out of everything on the list because she loves it. Because I wanted this to be a gift. Because I don’t know how else to express how lucky I feel to have her in my life. Because I wasn’t doing great when I moved back, and she and her husband gave me a soft place to land. Because Lipps, Inc. offered a shared language and something that would make us think of each other when we were apart and something that we can crank up when we are together. Because no road trip is complete without “Funkytown,” complete with the Talk 2 Much and Hitch Hike moves from Dance Central. Because joy is important.
Because the best things are deceptively simple—whether that’s a five-sentence song or a relationship forged by birth—and that’s how they endure.
*
It’s nighttime, and my boyfriend is driving my sister and me back from the outdoor disco symphony concert that was amazing but ended much too early, that was amazing but didn’t even include “Funkytown.” I must rectify the situation.
I am shorter, so I’m in the backseat, covered in glitter and rain and sweat, scrolling through my phone until I find our jam. In the front are the two people who love me best. The people who make it not just a Funkytown, but a funky home. One singing along with me, the other fully accepting his package deal.
What I know now is that Funkytown isn’t a place anyone can take you. I think you have to stop talking about it and just go, or you’ll end up wanting for the rest of your life.
It might not be the place you mean to end up, but I hope when you get there, it’s more beautiful than you think you deserve. You do, though. You do.
Amy Rossi lives, writes, and sometimes wears copious amounts of body glitter in North Carolina. Find more of her work at amyrossi.com.
keith pille on “beds are burning”
1. The song itself
It’s incongruous that this song is even on this list. It’s a freak fact, an artifact of the top 40 charts; to classify Midnight Oil with Taco feels like a category error. If you were a young musichead in the late 80s and early 90s, Midnight Oil were an immensity you had to reckon with. When Blue Sky Mining came out in 1990, it was a major event that we all anticipated and luxuriated in; I remember MTV going into one of their occasional “this is an album YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT!” cycles. And it was a major event, of course, because the success of 1987’s Diesel and Dust and its breakout single “Beds Are Burning” put us all on notice that this was a band to keep an eye on.
And there’s the rub. “Beds Are Burning” was a pretty big crossover hit. In the normal course of things, Midnight Oil were giants within the fevered niche of what we then called alternative rock and absolutely unknown outside of it. This one song, soaring on the fact that it fucking rocked and carried an urgent message (probably leaning harder on the “fucking rocked” side) crossed over out of the alt-rock world and into the top 40. Viewed from within the alt-rock world (and the successor “indie rock” world most readers of this tourney inhabit these days), Midnight Oil were titans; but viewed from within the top 40, they were a weird band who had one modest hit. It’s that Kenobi thing: many of the truths we cling to depend entirely on one’s point of view.
Back to the fact that the song fucking rocks; we wouldn’t care about it so much if it didn’t. It opens big: BAH-BAH BAAAMP! The horn stabs! A brief quiet pause, and then the rhythm section gets rolling. The bass and drums on this song are something to marvel at (when I brought this song into a bass lesson in high school, the slippery Peter Gunn thing they have going on absolutely defeated my teacher, who was otherwise peerless at working out parts for songs I brought in). They kick into a chugging, ticking engine that manages to sound organic and mechanistic at the same time. A heart, maybe?
Peter Garrett starts singing; it’s a singular voice, quavering and close to monotone (in the early going, he’s just moving between a few notes) but also somehow authoritative. And he’s telling us a story! “Out where the river broke…”
I don’t want to turn this into a livetweet of walking through the song; you can (and should!) listen to it and decide if it clicks for you. I just want to establish that it grabs your attention upfront and holds it throughout. And that it’s produced in a way that doesn’t much like anything else we were hearing back in 1987. Again, this thing opens with horn stabs that serve as a repeated hook through the song. The instrumental production is wide-open, clean and spacious, and it kind of has to be because there are a *lot* of instruments competing here: the aforementioned bass and drum parts, those recurring horns (including what sounds like a French horn taking a solo! Let me be clear: you do not hear a lot of French horn solos in rock and roll), synths, guitars, Peter Garrett’s voice (often multitracked). The balance of “there’s a lot going on here” and “but it’s produced so cleanly that none of it clashes” makes one think of late Pink Floyd, except that instead of indulgent and overwrought, this one’s just sincere and good.
In the absence of all context, this song is good on its own merits. But nothing exists without context; and there’s all kinds of interesting stuff here at different levels of focus.
2. Personal Context: The Australian thing
In the late 1930s, my grandfather was a baseball prospect in central Iowa; a scout from the Cubs invited him to come to Chicago to try out. But his father nixed the trip because he needed all of the help he could get on the hog farm, and the chance passed (the Cubs would subsequently take 77 years to win a World Series. Connection? You decide). A couple of years later, my grandfather was drafted into the US Army Air Corps and stationed in Australia, where he fixed planes, played baseball for a team in Sydney for a few years (family legend, which I want to believe but can’t really commit to, has it that he was called the “Lou Gehrig of Australian baseball”), and wooed a girl from Brisbane, who he eventually brought back to the American Midwest and had 11 kids with.
What this means is that growing up I (and all of my many aunts, uncles, and cousins) always had this weird Australian identity thing going on where, like of course we were American and GO USA! but also we were pretty into Australia and being Australian. This meant watching Crocodile Dundee a *lot* more than was really necessary, but it also meant being hipped to the fact that Australia really seemed to punch above its weight, population-wise, in terms of producing cool music. AC/DC, Men at Work, INXS; all bands I could feel a shiver of “they’re on *my* team” pride whenever I heard them on the radio.
And of course Midnight Oil was part of that pantheon, as I was sliding from listening to whatever the Omaha classic rock radio station happened to be playing to listening to stuff *I* was choosing on tape. But Midnight Oil was different from all of the other Australian bands. AC/DC ruled, but they were gloriously dumb (this was, in fact, part of why they ruled). Men at Work weren’t dumb, but they felt slight (maybe they shouldn’t have, given how heavy a song like “It’s a Mistake” is, but at the very least their production made them sound slight). INXS, it still pains me to admit, were really pretty close to as gloriously dumb as AC/DC, just presenting it in much more stylish wrapping (I say this not to shit on them; they rule. But most of their songs are written from the point of view of Michael Hutchence’s junk). Midnight Oil, on top of rocking, were clearly not dumb. They sounded really smart, and they had stuff to say. Stuff to say about important topics. This seemed especially big in the late 80s, when R.E.M. and U2 (and more on them in a moment) were establishing that to be a capital-letter Important Band you had to have stuff to say about important topics.
3. Music scene context: The Right Honorable Peter Garrett
The one giving voice to all that stuff to say about important topics, of course, was Peter Garrett, the band’s lead singer. Garrett fascinated me in 1987 and he fascinates me now. His voice, as I mentioned, is distinctive, and his point of view doubly so. But so is his physical presence: six and a half feet tall, skin bald, athletically built, and given to dancing in a way that wasn’t that unlike Martin Short’s comic character Ed Grimley. Midnight Oil videos used him to great effect; consider how often the video for this song is content to show him in silhouette, knowing that this is as arresting a visual as they need.
But let’s back up and talk about his point of view. It was taken as a given in the late 80s and early 90s that Important Bands must, as a condition of their importance, weigh in on the political matters of the day (I remember a sad conversation where a friend and I, acting as the world’s lamest revolutionary tribunal, concluded that it wasn’t OK to like Soul Asylum because they put too much energy into trying to be funny and not enough into making the world a better place). R.E.M. did it. U2 did it. Midnight Oil did it (foregrounding indigenous concerns in a way most of their peers didn’t, which we’ll be circling back to before long). But over the long haul, Garrett took a step further than pretty much any of his 80s alternative-rock peers: he stepped down off the stage and got in the actual fucking game.
Garrett served two stints as the President of the Australian Conservation Foundation, from ‘89 to ‘93 and then ‘98 to ‘02 (this means that he managed to kick absolute ass on Blue Sky Mining while in office), with a term on the international board of Greenpeace sandwiched in the middle there. In 2004, he was elected as a Labor Party member of the Australian House of Representatives, and was subsequently named Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts and then Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth, eventually leaving government in 2016.
I’m not plugged into Australian politics well enough (or at all, really) to know if Garrett was effective in these posts; knowing the nature of politics, I’m sure he accomplished some things but was often hemmed in by larger structural forces. He no doubt had to compromise frequently in a way that doesn’t live up to the rhetoric you can drop from a stage. But I’m absolutely in awe of the fact that he got into the game. As much as I respect Michael Stipe, he was never willing to go that far to back his words with action (as far as I can tell, the most politically active member of R.E.M. seems to be Mike Mills, who to this day still does absolute yeoman’s work owning reactionary dickheads on twitter; activism can take many forms). And it’s a damn sight better than the empty posturing of Bono, who yammered endlessly about liberal causes while doing photo ops with George W. Bush and later turning up as a lunch partner in Jared fucking Kushner’s memoir.
I’m reminded of a bit in Tom Perrotta’s Election when student Lisa Flanagan asks Mr. McAllister why the pundit George Will never actually ran for office, and McAllister dismissively says that a knob like Will knows deep down that he’d get smeared if he ever had the guts to actually try to put any of his opinions into practice. Bono reeks of George Will here; Garrett had the guts to wade into the fray.
4. Political context: It belongs to them
I keep mentioning that the song has important stuff to say. Let’s circle back to that.
For listeners who aren’t listening to more than the chorus (especially people who aren’t super imprinted onto the video), I think the song could land as a not terribly specific statement of urgency: how can we dance when our world keeps turning? How can we sleep while our beds our burning? These are great lines on their own, and they could easily attach themselves to any situation that’s in need of urgent action. In 2023, if you heard them without context, you’d think they were talking about climate change.
But they’re not. Australia is a land whose current residents are predominantly made up of descendants of Europeans who moved in and displaced or outright removed the people who’d previously been living there. This was an ugly process that involved a mix of outright murder and theft mixed with land-transfer agreements negotiated in bad faith by the Europeans. The members of Midnight Oil, touring through the Australian backcountry, saw the conditions that members of Australia’s indigenous people were experiencing, and it made them angry. Hence this song. The time has come to say fair’s fair. To pay the rent, to pay our share. In other words, at the very least, honor the fucking agreements, stop the ongoing exploitative behavior, and try to remediate what’s already been done.
I said earlier that I’m not plugged in enough to Australian politics to know if Peter Garrett was any good as a politician; along the same lines, I’m not conversant enough in Australian history and racial politics to catch all of the nuances in this song. But here’s the thing: I don’t really have to be to get the emotional drift, because the United States is every bit as much a case of Europeans moving in and stealing an entire continent. In the US (and I would be shocked to learn that it’s very different in Australia), the standard line is that well, that all happened long ago, what’s done is done, everything’s OK now; you only have to be minimally aware of the news to know that this isn’t the case. Oil companies are allowed again and again by the government to build pipelines across native lands, over the protests of tribal governments who say—rightly—that oil pipelines leak all the time and the leaks will put petroleum straight into their water supply. It’s a crock of shit, and it needs to stop. Honor the fucking agreements. Stop the ongoing exploitative behavior. Try to remediate what’s already been done. The song resonates because the problems it speaks to are both very specific and depressingly widespread and timeless.
It's worth asking: is it right for a bunch of white musicians to write a song that tries to give voice to indigenous communities? And that’s not a thing I can answer with much of a rhetorical leg to stand on, being a white person myself (and one from another country at that). It would have been wonderful if there had been an Indigenous Australian band in a position to have a hit singing about the shit deal they’d been given. But the structure of the music industry, especially in 1987, all but precluded such a thing. In the meantime, Midnight Oil was there and did have a platform. To me, at least, this song does feel like a sincere effort made in good faith; Garrett and the Oils (that’s what we hep insiders call them, by the way) never claim in this song to speak for indigenous Australians. The song’s lyrics are constructed to clearly always be colonizers addressing other colonizers: “it belongs to THEM, WE’VE gotta give it back.”
God knows that white people trying to involve themselves in indigenous concerns can go very badly; more often than not, it winds up feeling like their (our?) point is just to center themselves. “Stay in your lane” is a common piece of advice for a reason (and a quick aside here: “The Dead Heart,” another Diesel and Dust track, is written from a Native point of view and did draw criticism for it, especially for furthering a “primitive” stereotype; the band eventually decreed that all royalties from that song be given to indigenous groups, which was probably the right thing to do but also does feel like a lame after-the-fact “oopsie!” response). On the other hand, if you have a platform with a lot of visibility, and a chance to elevate an issue that you sincerely care about, maybe it’s not a bad thing to try to put the spotlight on it, in a way that doesn’t make you the main character? As an American, I’m much more conscious of Australian indigenous issues than I otherwise would have been, thanks to the music of Midnight Oil, especially this song. That has to be worth something. On the other hand, it’s arguable that not much in the way of actual real-world improvement has happened because of that consciousness, which I guess should factor into exactly how much it’s worth. On the other other hand (we Australian-Americans are known for often having three hands), that awareness has undoubtedly filtered over into the way I view American Indigenous issues, in a political sphere where I theoretically do have some minute influence as a voter, donor, and general loudmouth. Who knows? Advocacy is a land of contrasts.
Again, if the song’s concerns transcend the specific and move up to the general, in 2023 America “Beds Are Burning” always makes me think of the Land Back movement. I can’t pretend to know every detail of the Land Back program; and I have to imagine that, as with any large movement, you’re going to hear widely different goals and methods depending on who you ask. But what I understand as the basic goal—return lands that, per existing agreements, should belong to tribal nations back to those nations (the Black Hills being a prime example)—just seems like the morally correct thing to do. Honor the fucking agreements. Stop the ongoing exploitative behavior. Try to remediate what’s already been done. At the very least, have the conversation and move the Overton Window.
Two summers ago, in northern Minnesota near some tribal land, I saw graffiti on a rail bridge that made me think of “Beds Are Burning.” It said “WHITE PEOPLE: THIS IS OUR LAND. BUT WE’LL LET YOU STAY HERE IF YOU TREAT IT NICE.” It feels like we should be able to do a little more than that, but that seems like a good starting place at least. The time has come; a fact’s a fact.
Keith Pille lives in Minneapolis, unless he has frozen to death by the time this essay has run. Assuming he is not currently entombed in a block of ice, he writes articles and newsletters, draws cartoons, and makes podcasts (one about music, one about sea monsters). He shares his ice cave with his collage artist wife and a comically huge dog.