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Wild Cherry
Epic/Sweet City PE 34195
Released: July 1976
Chart Peak: #5
Weeks Charted: 29
Certified Platinum: 12/17/76
Wild Cherry, a four-man band from Steubenville, Ohio, who have a big hit with "Play That Funky Music," specialize in crude electric funk derived from early Sly and the Family Stone. Though black groups like Parliament work the same turf in a manner at once more sophisticated and more ominous, Wild Cherry's dance music is at least raucously catchy in its parody of lewdness.
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 Further reading on Super Seventies RockSite!: |
- Stephen Holden, Rolling Stone, 9/9/76.
Bonus Review
This is regarded by the pure of heart as racist vulgarization, but although I'll go along with the argument that the hook on "Play That Funky Music" isn't the rhythm track but the words "white boy," I insist that it's real hard to vulgarize Graham Central Station. Sure the performance is a it on the crude side, but the relationship is more that of Grand Funk to Cream than of, say, Jim Dandy Mangrum to Sly Stone. C
- Robert Christgau, Christgau's Record Guide, 1981.
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