Gap Band - IV

My family rarely went on vacations that were not within a one day driving distance from my home. It didn’t really bother me and I can no completely understand the financial reasons for such a decision.
There was one time when the three of us did load into our Dodge Aspen station wagon and drive all the way down to New Orleans, stopping in Memphis on the way down before tackling the remaining Bayou drive on the second day.
The Aspen had AM radio, a form of entertainment that seems ridiculously criminative now. I may have brought an equally criminative cassette player that could barely advance the C-90 cassettes, possibly due to the lack of foresight in acquiring fresh batteries before we departed.
AM radio sucks now and back then it was only marginally better.
By the time we reached the Louisiana border, the only station that Dad’s AM radio could pick up was a big wattage urban station out of Baton Rouge. More than likely it has become a station that you’re able to hear locally, as there is very little localism left in radio thanks to endless homogenizing mergers.
But back then, there was some personality.
And back then, they played Gap Band’s “You Dropped A Bomb On Me” repeatedly.
It must have been the release week of Gap Band IV, because they played nearly every cut off of it, including the tracks that were never officially released as singles. The focus was “Bomb,” so they played that one often, to the point where my father groaned at the sound of those falling bombs, endlessly searching for a new signal that may have come into range.
He’d twiddle the radio knob, find a barely audible station, and then give up once the static became too much to handle.
Inevitably, we’d end back at that big wattage urban station, waiting for the next installment of the Gap Band.
When your 13 years old and in New Orleans, it’s not terribly fun. I remember roaming the streets while my parents left to get drunk on hurricanes, encountering my first view of a gay subculture, getting kicked out of a Lebanese restaurant while trying to get cigarettes from their vending machine, and being accosted by a prostitute before determining that the seedy nightlife of New Orleans was all too much for my young Iowa mind to take.
When we did return to the Hawkeye station, two songs kept running through my head as musical reminders of the trip: Aldo Nova’s “Fantasy” and Gap Band’s “You Dropped A Bomb On Me.”
I bought both albums as permanent records, but only one of them, Gap Band IV, has withstood the years between and proven to be just as funky fresh as it was the first time I heard it on the airwaves of that Louisiana AM urban station.
Everything about that tune is great: from the aforementioned bomb sound effects to the line (“You were my hope/Baby you were my smoke”) to the woofer breaking synth bass, this is a classic funk song worthy of endless praise.
Start to finish, IV is a classic urban rhythm and blues record, filled with the prerequisite up-tempo funk numbers (“Bomb,” “Early In The Morning”) and the obligatory slow jams (“Seasons No Reason To Change,” “Stay With Me”).
It ends with the awesome “Talkin’ Back,” a free-style funk number with one of the greatest lines ever (“Great gosh all-mighty lemmie see ya baby lets get down with it!”) that James Brown would have give up his popcorn for.
To this day, I spin IV, and there are a lot more memories created where it’s served as a soundtrack. But I still remember where it started, on the AM radio of a Dodge Aspen station wagon, and I can probably guess what my old man thinks about it.