(The Hit Hammer is where I'm reviewing each #1 song on the Billboard Hot 100. Starting from when the chart started in 1958 and eventually working my way to the present. To see my inspiration and more information about this blog, please CLICK HERE)
KC & the Sunshine Band - "(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty"
Hit Number 1: September 11, 1976
Stay at Number 1: 1 Week
At this point in the Hit Hammer, one thing is very clear: the lyrics to disco songs are filled with nothing. The songs are usually about nothing but dancing, or if I were to use the word everyone was saying at the time, boogieing. Maybe there's no better poster child to this than KC & the Sunshine Band, a band that started out of Miami after bass player Richard Finch and lead singer Harry Casey (KC) were inspired by the music playing in those clubs. KC & the Sunshine Band were all about finding powerful grooves and earwormy hooks to bring people to a dance floor, and they were definitely good at doing that. However the lyrics to all their songs were basically placeholders to keep the songs from becoming instrumentals. The last two times they appeared in this blog, with "Get Down Tonight" and "That's the Way (I Like It)" they gave us songs about basically nothing, but songs that were liable to get stuck in your head for ages after listening to them.
Anyway, this was the formula for the band, and it continued to work. Finch and Casey continued to go to night clubs and watched everyone to see what kinds of dances they were doing. Finch would say later that the Bump was a dance pretty big at the time, and every now and then someone would literally start shaking their ass in the middle of the club. This was the kind of thing KC & the Sunshine Band ate up. If there was a popular dance going on, they were going to write a song about it. So that's why we live in a world where a song called "(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty" exists. And I can only imagine that there were countless amounts of people shaking their asses when this song was playing. After all, that's what it commands you to do. It even tells the listener (or dancer I guess) that they're the "best in the world" at shaking their ass. KC can tell.
I'd be lying if I said "Shake Your Booty" didn't also have hooks, just like the band's first two #1 hits. That "shake, shake, shake/shake, shake, shake/ shake your booty" line in the chorus is yet another line in a disco song that's nearly impossible to flush out of your brain once it's there. KC is also playing a clavinet, which all my life I thought was a guitar, but those little riffs he's playing are subtle yet bring the song some flare. But there's something missing in "Shake Your Booty" that the other two Sunshine Band #1 hits had. Where something like, say, "Get Down Tonight" had a lot of fire to it, and was much more of an irresistible jam, "Shake Your Booty" pales in comparison mostly because it's a lot more mild. It's not as convincing as the other two songs. I still like what they were trying to do with the same hooks that made them famous to begin with, but I think it's fair to say that "Shake Your Booty" is a dry song comparing to other KC & the Sunshine Band songs. It's also the easiest to forget in my opinion.
"Shake Your Booty" wasn't helped by the fact that its own B-side, "Boogie Shoes," was also a pretty big hit, and while it wasn't a #1 hit, it's probably an even better song than "Shake Your Booty." ("Boogie Shoes" didn't make it super high on the charts, and that was probably only because it was a B-side. It made it to #35 in 1978 and it's a 7)
But of course, that's just one opinion of the song, and clearly "Shake Your Booty" still proved to be a major hit for the band. It also helps that we're right in the heart of the disco era, so anything that was about dancing could be a hit. Nobody took advantage of that more than KC & the Sunshine Band, and they would continue to take advantage of that. We haven't seen the last of them in this blog.
GRADE: 5/10
IN POP CULTURE:
Even for The Simpsons this scene is strange. There appears to be some robotic Richard Simmons that sings "(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty" before it gets shot. I don't know the context here. But, here's that scene:
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