This is a band I know a lot about regarding their music as it was a top five band for me growing up. There hasn’t been much discussion about sound quality and their vinyl output, curious as all their hit albums came out while vinyl was the main medium. And so will the booty.Click to expand.I am pretty particular about sound quality. KC & The Sunshine Band will appear in this column again. But in 1976, with disco suddenly taking over the world, that was a song that people wanted to hear. You could argue, with some justification, that it’s really just the same song. But plenty of singles directly inspired by Miami bass sure will.Īs for “Shake Your Booty” itself, the song isn’t as lively or brute-force catchy as “Get Down Tonight” or “(That’s The Way) I Like It,” but it’s cut from the same cloth.

Unless I’m forgetting something, no Miami bass singles will appear in this column. About a decade after “Shake Your Booty,” in the Sunshine Band’s hometown of Miami, an entire rap-music subgenre dedicated entirely to butts would rise up and change the world. But “Shake Your Booty” is purely about butts, and about what you should do with them, in a way that so many future songs would turn out to be about butts. “Shake Your Booty” is not the first song specifically about butts to hit #1 Johnnie Taylor’s “ Disco Lady,” for one, got in there earlier. Everything Casey sings is one kind of encouragement or another: “You can! You can do it! Very well! You’re the! Best in the world! I can tell!” This is a near-Andrew W.K. It almost works as propaganda, badgering anyone who hears it into dropping all defenses and having fun. “Shake Your Booty” betrays no awareness that it could ever be anything other than a nonsense song. It’s part of a long, proud lineage of nonsense songs. “Shake Your Booty” is a nonsense song, but that’s not a bad thing. And as soon as he hits the chorus - which he hits again and again, for practically forever - the horns come bursting in joyously behind him.

When Casey sings, he surrounds himself with either backing singers or multi-tracked versions of his own voice, making up for the thinness of his voice by turning himself into a massed army. “Shake Your Booty” starts off as a lush, fast variation on spidery James Brown funk, but with more sustain on the pianos and less depth in the riffage.

Casey and Finch knew how to make a beat work. It’s the sheer shamelessness of the groove. In your whole life.” Casey tried to think about it too much.Īs with every Sunshine Band hit, the strength of “Shake Your Booty” isn’t the message. But it had a lot more meaning and depth… There could be several connotations to ‘Shake Your Booty.’ It could mean to get off your can and get out there and do it - in every area, not necessarily dancing. As soon as we got back off the road we’d go right into the studio with that freshly captured energy, start recording, and not try to think too much.”īut when Casey discussed “Shake Your Booty” with Fred Bronson in Bronson’s Billboard Book Of Number 1 Hits, he tried to get more philosophical about it: “To some, it was a nonsense song. Talking to Songfacts years later, Finch explained that he and Casey had been hitting the clubs, watching people do the Bump, trying to figure out how to write about it: “We’d pay attention to what the people were doing, either body moves or body language, and try to transfer that back into the next production. (I counted.) “(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty” is still the only #1 single to repeat a word four times in its title. Over the course of the three-minute track, Casey repeats the word “shake” an astonishing 96 times. “(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty” somehow managed to simplify that formula even more. KC & The Sunshine Band’s “(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty” followed two maddeningly, gloriously repetitive #1 hits, “ Get Down Tonight” and “ (That’s The Way) I Like It.” Those songs had been all hook, no chorus, and they’d drilled their simplistic messages deep into the brain matter of whoever heard them.

Kc richard finch sunshine