Cameo

Larry Blackmon and his Cameo mates ruled funk's domain for over a decade. Cameo evolved from its origins as a horn-based and dominated ensemble into a synthesizer-oriented group that still featured sturdy basslines and exuberant vocals, but was in tune with urban and black America's new sensibility. These 14 selections range from the formative cuts "Rigor Mortis," "Shake Your Pants," and "It's Over" to the definitive "Word Up," "Candy," and "Back and Forth." Blackmon's alternately sneering, defiant, and aggressive vocals were the constant from Cameo's beginnings in the 1970s to their emergence as funk's reigning champions in the 1980s.

For a variety of reasons, all of the recordings for Cameo Parkway remained out of circulation until 2005, when Abkco finally unveiled the catalog, first as a box set called Cameo Parkway 1957-1967 in the spring, then as a series of individual artist compilations in the fall. Of those, the most eagerly-awaited collection was the one spotlighting Chubby Checker, since he was the biggest star on the label and the guy that got America twisting in the early '60s. Checker might have had big hits, but his compilation, The Best of Chubby Checker: Cameo Parkway 1959-1963, is musically the thinnest of all the Cameo Parkway titles released in 2005.

By 1984, African-American popular music had become extremely high tech. The horn-powered funk bands that were huge in the 1970s were out of style, and young audiences were demanding hip-hop, electro-funk, and urban contemporary – not horn bands that sounded like the Ohio Players or Tower of Power circa 1975. Horn bands were still in vogue only in the home of the go-go explosion: Washington, DC. But these changes in the marketplace didn't hurt Cameo; both commercially and creatively, 1984's She's Strange was a winner.

Cameo's second album, We All Know Who We Are, is uneven, but it has its moments, both in the quiet storm field ("Why Have I Lost You") and the disco-funk category ("It's Serious"). Much of the record sounds like filler, but the best moments illustrate that Cameo is beginning to grow and refine their own sound.
An outlandish, in-your-face stage presence, a strange sense of humor, and a hard-driving funk sound that criss-crossed a few musical boundaries earned Cameo countless comparisons to Parliament/Funkadelic in their early days. However, Cameo eventually wore off accusations of being derivative by transcending their influences and outlasting almost every single one of them. Throughout the '70s and '80s, the group remained up with the times and occasionally crept ahead of them, such that they became influences themselves upon younger generations of R&B and hip-hop acts…