HIT OR SHIT (1983 edition)

Well, you know, people are singling out George's vocal performance and sound, and...yes, 100% I would agree that this is where the gold is mostly buried. He sings it beautifully - 'honeyed' is a better descriptor than anything I could muster. His vocal here is like a piece of chicken or ribs where all of the meat falls off the bone exactly as you'd wish it to. It flows. He doesn't REMOTELY oversing it (no knock on Helen Terry, but...on the likes of "Church of the Poison Mind", at least, she really does chew up the scenery with some patented period "I'm soulful, me!" provincialisms...I'm this close to Googling whether she and Moyet had any sort of long simmering petty trash talking rivalry or cold war).

The intro is a stroke of structural and dynamic brilliance.

The song is - I mean, it's a sickly sweet lovelorn bubblegum confection that delivers some expert major minor tension, and manages to hit the hook about as hard as you can without overdoing it (the "chorus and a half" at the end works a LOT better than it should). Rim shots aside, I think the track sounds pretty correct (minimal pre-fab period damage), and the recurring electric sitar motif is a masterstroke (especially as it periodically varies the resolving note). Even the ham-fisted use of the faux-dub echo on George's voice in the instrumental break is...I couldn't live without it.

A lot of things go right.

So, not remotely a major act in my world, but...a record that I find 100% undeniable. I can't fight it, wouldn't want to.

This would have been the first thing I heard by them (at 13) - the likes of "White Boy" and "Mystery Boy" and "I'm Afraid of Me" would have been less than a myth in the US. It was impossible to resist and kicked off a decidedly concise (but unrelenting) run of US radio/MTV hits (they struck while the iron was hot), of which "Time" is the only other one for which I can really muster any real affection. Even in increasingly distant memory, the likes of "Miss Me Blind", "It's a Miracle", "I'll Tumble 4 Ya", and the deathless and charmless "Karma Chameleon" scan as decidedly obnoxious ("someone else's idea of fun").

"Pops up on the radio in the wild approximately once a decade" is about right for me, and that is higher praise than it probably seems. You don't need it in abundance, but at the right interval, I can - dare I say - be moved by it.

An evenly split vote feels about right - it felt like the kind of track that would elicit a full spectrum of responses.

Love the song, love the album. I was going to a lot of underground dance clubs at the time and really developing a love of reggae. I think Boy George (and the band) did a great job of cultivating reggae, tropical rhythms, R&B and funk into their own sound. But lots of UK groups like ABC, Paul Young and Wham we're doing the same thing with their own spin.

I really liked that Motown invited George Michael, Boy George and Hall & Oates on that early '80s special. Of course, they were did it to get a wide viewing audience, but they fit in great.

A decade later, I loved that Joss Stone, Duffy, Amy Winehouse, and my favorite, Lisa Stanfield, did the same for UK blue-eyed soul.