Musical Monday - Give It Up by KC and the Sunshine Band

#1 on the Billboard Hot 100: Never.

#1 on the Cash Box Top 100: Never.

#1 on the U.K. Chart: August 13, 1983 through August 27, 1983.

This is a song by a band at the end of its life, bereft of interesting ideas, desperate to churn out anything that will keep it relevant and failing badly. By 1983, the career of KC and the Sunshine Band was on life support. Their last notable hit had been in 1980 with the eminently forgettable Please Don't Go. They were, by 1983, a disco-era band that was trying to make it in a pop music landscape that was extremely hostile to disco music.
It doesn't help that this song is simply not very good. It has a dance beat, but everything about it seems almost like the band is just going through the motions. There's no real hook, no real substance to the lyrics, nothing particularly interesting about the vocal delivery, and nothing particularly memorable about the instrumentation. This song is bland, generic, and boring.

The blandness of the song isn't really helped by the video, which doesn't really do anything to illustrate or highlight the song. In the past I highlighted a couple of music videos that had inexplicably science fictional themes, and this one goes onto that list. The song is a generic dance song, while the video is a badly acted oddball fantasy horror quest where the climax is untying some ropes and an almost completely random deus ex machina. There's literally no connection between the music and the images presented, and that makes the entire thing almost entirely unmemorable.

This was the last gasp of KC and the Sunshine Band, and I can only say that after this they deserved the obscurity that awaited them.

Previous Musical Monday: Wherever I Lay My Hat (That's My Home) by Paul Young

Subsequent Musical Monday: Red Red Wine by UB40

Previous #1 on the U.K. Chart: Wherever I Lay My Hat (That's My Home) by Paul Young

Subsequent #1 on the U.K. Chart: Red Red Wine by UB40

List of #1 Singles from the Billboard Hot 100 for 1980-1989
List of #1 Singles from the Cash Box Top 100 for 1980-1989
List of #1 Singles on the U.K. Chart for 1980-1989

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