You can do it all night long
Lionel Richie is no Michael Jackson, but “All Night Long” shows that he was paying close attention to what Jackson had done with Thriller. And anyway, who wants to be mad at “All Night Long”? If “All Night Long” came out in the past few years, Richie would’ve pissed a whole lot of people off. Maybe Richie shouldn’t have gotten away with that fake accent or those fake chants. Instead of trying to honestly engage the traditions that he pulled from, Richie just lazily gestured at them. That means “All Night Long (All Night)” is straight-up cultural appropriation. Upon learning that the people of Africa spoke thousands of different dialects and that it would take weeks to come up with a workable translation for what he wanted to say, Richie just made up some words. When Richie was writing “All Night Long,” he called a friend at the UN to ask for some “African” phrases. Richie just made up his fake African chant out of thin air. (“Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin'” is a 10.) But Jackson had taken those chants from somewhere - specifically, from “Soul Makossa,” the 1972 single from the Cameroonian bandleader Manu Dibango. Michael Jackson, Richie’s eventual collaborator, had used fake African chanting on “ Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” a single that had peaked at #5 earlier in 1983. And then there’s the song’s bridge, with the fake African chanting. “Fiesta”: Spanish for “party.” “Karamu”: Swahili for “party” (or really “banquet”). On “All Night Long,” Richie pulls stray bits and phrases from other languages. He’s terrible at it, which somehow makes the whole enterprise that much more charming. “All Night Long” isn’t a reggae song, but Richie still goes all-in on that accent. But on a song like Blondie’s “ The Tide Is High,” the most directly reggae-influenced song that had hit #1 in America at that point, Debbie Harry was still using her own voice. Before Richie, plenty of artists had toyed around with reggae and scored huge American hits. Three years before Drake was born, Lionel Richie brought the fake Jamaican accent to the top of the American charts. Richie was smart enough to see that American pop music had become a universal global language, and he steered right into that, making the kind of thing that would sound inoffensively playful anywhere on the planet. “All Night Long (All Night),” the first single from Richie’s Can’t Slow Down album, is a conscious and successful effort to make an international jam. In 1983, while working on his second solo album, Richie wanted to make the kind of song that people could dance to while on vacation. He probably could’ve kept making those ballads forever.īut Richie had other territory to explore. Richie had gotten his start playing party-funk in the Commodores, but ballads were what made Richie rich. You could be forgiven for thinking that all of them were the same gooily sincere love-ballad, even when Richie wasn’t the one singing. All of them were gooily sincere love ballads.
In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.īetween 19, Lionel Richie wrote six different #1 singles.