1984: I Feel For You

Did I stutter?

Strange how potent cheap music can be. It can preserve a moment, trapped in vinyl, and it can last a lifetime, accompanying, inspiring, supporting. Year by year, these are the songs that have soundtracked our lives.

I have a confession: I don’t like ‘I Feel For You’ by Chaka Khan. This feels like a bad place to start, because pretty much everyone else thinks it’s perfect. This includes Tobias, who is not a noted connoisseur of new jack swing; my best school-run-mum friend, who listens to Magic FM; and my children’s father, who likes music you couldn't possibly understand by artists you have absolutely never heard of.  

Everybody except me, apparently, loves ‘I Feel For You’. Now that Spotify has collapsed the signifiers of age and genre and generally brought popular music into a single unified bloc, the youth have discovered ‘I Feel For You’; my older son — guess what? — loves it. (Literally this week there was excited chatter in the family WhatsApp about Chaka Khan doing a Tiny Desk, an NPR strand that — I’m told — is like Peel Sessions, but recorded in the corner of an office.)

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It’s just never done it for me. And I’ve had a lot of time to think about this, because I first started hearing ‘I Feel For You’ a lot more than I wanted to 40 years ago, when it was released in 1984.

This is basically my mother’s fault, as is traditional. She went about her business with Radio 4 burbling constantly in the background, which meant that – as well as Farming Week and The Financial World Tonight and Poetry Please! (no thank you!) – she listened to, and internalised the contents of, Science Now. And at some point in the early ‘80s, Science bloody Now told her that headphones cause hearing loss.

This, in turn, led to the issuing of an edict that my brother and I would not be allowed Walkmans or headphones of any kind until we achieved adulthood, got incomes, started buying our own stuff, and generally went the hell away. And all of this meant that the only way we could listen to music of our choice was to commandeer the record player in our front room and make use of its speakers.

We almost always did this alone, which gave it a kind of devotional quality; there was an unspoken understanding that nobody else would come into the room while we were listening to our records. But this is not to say that the rest of the family was unmarked by the experience, because the more we liked something, the more we would turn the volume up. And my brother really liked ‘I Feel For You’. When he went alone into our front room to play it he would turn the speakers all the way up to 8. (It never crossed our minds to turn them up to 10. We weren’t that sort of family.)

So it was that, for about six months, ‘I Feel For You’ became the fifth member of the household. I can confidently report that it is a very trebly sort of track, and that its synth trills and hi-hats remain audible through two firmly closed doors. Our shonky speakers didn’t do a lot with the bass, but not to worry: those frequencies were amply provided by other means. 

This was the era of body popping and headspinning and The Kids From Fame! Under the influence of the times, my brother and I both liked to express our musical enthusiasm using the universal language of dance. Unfortunately we are from stout Pembrokeshire farming stock, and we defied gravity in exactly the way that Shire horses don’t. When my brother — wearing a karate belt tied around his forehead, a white vest from M&S, and red nylon shorts — was dancing to ‘I Feel For You’, you could hear it from the bathroom to the garden shed, and probably on the Space Shuttle.

Of course, you don’t listen to a song you love just once. And my brother — did I mention? — really loved ‘I Feel For You’. After each thunderous performance there would be a pause; sometimes a short one while my brother lifted the needle and brought it carefully back to the beginning, sometimes a longer one during which he would emerge from the front room, running with sweat, to have a pee or get a glass of water or just stand in the garden in the cool winter night, emitting steam. And then he would go back into the front room, close the door, and we would be off for another round with Chaka. 

And alright: I sort of get it, in the way you can ‘get’ a perfect pop song even if it doesn’t hit your personal sweet spot. It’s fast and fun, and amazingly kinetic. The synths swoop and then stab, holding you in space while the momentum punches through you; and then the synths explode and you hurtle off again. It’s the audio equivalent of a ride on a Waltzer, and I can’t say fairer than that because I bloody love Waltzers. I am also a tremendous fan of a Stevie Wonder harmonica solo. And I bought ‘Little Red Corvette’ by Prince (whose song it originally was) before Prince was even a thing in the UK. I really should have liked ‘I Feel For You’.

But you can divide Prince songs into meticulously engineered falsettos and free-swinging grooves, and I’ve always preferred the latter. I love ‘Starfish and Coffee’ and ‘I Could Never Take The Place of Your Man’, but the mode that everyone associates with Prince is the stop-start-and-hiccup of ‘Kiss’, and it’s this stuttery vibe that characterises ‘I Feel For You’. It’s also the giveaway that someone is ripping Prince off: see Janelle Monáe’s ‘The Way You Make Me Feel’ and Amerie’s ‘1 Thing’, with their precise trebly pops and clicks and air-gaps. It’s all so weightless. If ‘the funk’ means skittering about like a surprised earwig then I just do not have the funk, and I don’t care who knows it. Give me the great big stomping squelch of ‘Superstition’ any day.

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There were a lot of stuttery songs in 1984. There were a lot of stops and starts and repeats, and darts and slaps and pokes and sudden incursions, like having a fight with three or more toddlers. There was also far, far too much stuff being played backwards. Keyboard technology was evolving fast — in 1983 US sales of keyboards overtook sales of fretted instruments for the first time — and a generation of producers were experimenting with sampling. Twelve-inch club-mixes had brought the whole idea of ‘remixing’ to the mainstream surface; and, regrettably, the general public had discovered rap. 

To be polite, the various musical expressions of these trends did not always display a sophisticated understanding of the importance of thematic unity. Some tracks – like ‘White Lines’ by Melle Mel (who also appeared on ‘I Feel For You’) and ‘Automatic’ by The Pointer Sisters – had the same jazz/MOBO heritage as ‘I Feel For You’ and were at least musically coherent. I absolutely couldn’t stand Scritti Politti – STOP FUCKING SQUEAKING – but similarly he did seem to have a clear idea of what he was actually doing. ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’ is a very irritating song and has the worst title in the history of music, but George Michael was too much of a pop genius not to understand how the genre could be made to work. But 1984 saw an awful lot of uncomprehending cut-and-shuts, like Duran Duran’s ‘The Reflex’ (pick an idea! I don’t care which one!), ‘Sexcrime’ by The Eurythmics, and everything by Nik Kershaw and Howard Jones.

The whole musical year was so unrestful, frantic and acidic, full of static and glare. Cyndi Lauper was singing in a register known only to dogs and Frankie Goes To Hollywood were working through every sound effect in the BBC’s Stereophonic Workshop. It was the year I began to give up on the charts, and started — ever so cautiously — to explore other things: when I commandeered the front room I was hollering along to ‘The Saturday Boy’ by Billy Bragg and trying out dance moves to U2’s ‘New Year’s Day’, which was even worse than that sounds.

‘I Feel For You’ was by no means the worst record released in 1984; obviously, the fact that it annoys me so much is testament to its skitter-stutter power. But it was definitely the record I heard the greatest number of times that year, despite — I just want to make this clear — really not liking it. Still, I’m in good company: Chaka Khan herself says she’s ‘very bored of “I Feel For You”’. I think… I think I love her.

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You can get more Melle Mel, meanwhile, by listening to ‘White Lines’ with Adam Frost: