Tickle your fancy

Are we not men? No! We are Jermaine Jackson and DEVO! performing together in a Halloween special in 1982!

Honestly, back in the day, I never understood why this song was not a number 1 in the U.S. Instead it had to "settle" for top 20 pop/top 5 R&B. Nothing to be ashamed of but a chart ranking middling enough to guarantee obscurity within just a few years.

Get this: You had a member of the Jackson mafia family, which was everywhere in the early 1980s. You had the ultra hip new wave band DEVO, which was probably at the peak of its alternative popularity. (At least if memory serves from my college days.) You had an incredibly catchy hook ("Let me tickle your fancy/let me excite your soul") and a highly danceable beat. And you had a very adorable and sexy Jermaine doing his best work, a few years before he'd crash and burn his credibility with a duet with Pia Zadora.

In essence, you had 1982 in a 3-minute pop nutshell.

Maybe it was racism--"black people don't play rock 'n' roll" and all that bullshit. Maybe it was a less popular Jackson in the spotlight (neither feast nor fowl, neither Michael nor Janet). Maybe it was a song stuck between worlds, not R&B, not rock, attempting to appeal to too many audiences through the talents of two slightly less than high profile performers. (How is this that different to "State of Shock," the Michael Jackson-Rollling Stones hit from 1984?) Maybe it was danceable but not in the right way - too alternative, not Hi NRG, disco's cheap, tacky, easy little sister. Maybe it was too perfect of a song and sounded like a lot of other stuff on the charts at the time. Which maybe it did, maybe it didn't.

Regardless, I thought this was a perfect pop gem at the time and still do nearly 40 (!!!) years later. Frankly, as old as it is, it still seems more exciting, entertaining, and authentic than every piece of pop pablum on the scene at this time.

Yeah, I'm *that* old.