CULTURE CLUB – "Karma Chameleon"

It is astonishing just how massive this was at the time. IIRC the last time that something had been number one for six weeks was back in the 1978 height of Greasemania, and I can offer personal testimony of this record’s maximum reach, as my father sometimes irritatingly recollects “What was that song that Boy George had – Gumma gumma gumma?”

When something gets this familiar I do tend to find that I never need to hear it again unless it has a bit more overt emotional heft to it than Karma Chameleon – perhaps unfairly, as Tom points out there are clever things in it if you’re listening out for them.

And I have that awful pop snob thing in me with which I am sure many of us are familiar of asking “Why couldn’t it have been Victims, or Time (Clock of the Heart), when those are the two *best* ones?”

Ultimately though, I think that the greatest achievement of this is still what struck me most about it at eleven – that any song which sings about karma, rastifarian colours and chameleons has got to be a good thing.

TOTPWatch. Culture Club performed ‘Karma Chameleon’ once on Top Of The Pops;

22 September 1983. Also in the studio that week were; Howard Jones, Hot Chocolate, The Alarm, Nick Heyward and Soft Cell. Mike Read & Simon Bates were the hosts.

Phew!

I really didn’t like this at the time – total dominance and also I couldn’t understand the lyrics. In fact I thought that the band had made the word “karma” up and it was a nonsense song.

(I am still not sure the phrase means v much)

This wasn’t a case where I gradually realised the error of my ways: I heard it again years later and thought “hold on, this is terrific”, and that was that.

the title would make more sense if it had a numanesque comma in it: “karma, chameleon!” — ie “payback is a bitch, you flibbertigibbet, you can’t styleshift out of yr just desserts forever!”

(disclaimer: i have bin trying to “make sense” of bowie’s “glass spider”, and am somewat anti-chameleon as a consequence… hats aside, BG really ISN’T a chameleon much)

Important pun data: “Comma chameleon” (3,460 results) beats “Korma chameleon” (1,550)

watching the video again made me realise that I like this song more than I remembered. There’s an appealing tension between the jaunty beat and the sense of melancholy and loss in George’s voice.

Even the video, which I used to find irritating, seems to imagine an impossible (and knowingly so) fantasy of a racially integrated American South which now seems similarly bittersweet. The final scenes of the band and their friends in the warm glow of the sunset are sweetly nostalgic.

It cracks me up when the video states definitively that this is 1870 – lest we confuse it with 1869 or 1871.

Okay, so here’s your weird American cultural reference for the day. We used to use this song to “audibly torture” pledges to our Fraternity. I was the creator of the very special “Karma Chameleon (BeatBoxDuey mix)” to this very day I have young men who are at the University telling me of having to listen to this mix and that they now know almost all the lines to the song (right or wrong).

I really was a sadistic bastard back then (1985-1988). I did the same thing with Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name”. Envision the “Shot through the heart” part looped about 20 times, each time it’s said.

My only earlier version was a horrible chop-up of “My Sharona” by The Knack. Gotta dig out those old cassette tapes of those so I can share.

I feel like such a curmudgeon, but this is an early 80s Bye Bye Baby for me – ubiquitous, thin, and a number one that followed a couple of markedly superior 45s by the act in question. A slippery but predictable fall from here to War Song a year on. As for lyrical sleights of hand:

“Karma chameleon
You karm-an go”

is pretty trite. Blegghh. I feel not being 11 when it came out may affect my judgment, but KC’s perky efforts still found a place in my heart.

Pop songs as terrace chants pt.27: this was briefly “come-a come-a come-a come on you U’s” at Oxford United, presumably to derisive laughter from visiting fans still wedded to Gary Glitter and Chicory Tip.

i met george at bagleys warehouse in kings x. he was much shorter than my friend steven.

Tom’s opening paragraph citing the best lyric in the song, “You’re my lover not my rival”, is the reason I love this song. Always thought of that lyric whenever I had a few words with my wife. Boy George as marriage counselor!

After a gap of months, the UK and Australian number ones were back in synch, with the usual slight time delay: between “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and this, we had 7 weeks of Irene Cara’s “Flashdance… What a Feeling” and 8 weeks of Austen Tayshus’s “Australiana”, the 12″ single of a stand-up routine that employed a lot of Oz-themed puns. (Fairly adult in nature, so the radio stations played only an excerpt, which I’m sure helped keep it on top for so long; kids bought it to hear what they were missing, especially once they got wind that it was a bit blue. I certainly fell for it.)

At last it was Culture Club’s turn, and of their two Australian number ones (our first also being “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me”), this is certainly the sunniest – the perfect hit for a southern spring. For some reason I remembered the video as having George on an open-topped bus, which makes me wonder if that Mississippi paddle-steamer ever got turned into a Sydney Mardi Gras float. That possibility feels significant, because in 1983 a Culture Club number one was more than a poppy tune, it was a challenge to straight ocker culture. The first Sydney Mardi Gras had been held only five years before, and homosexuality was still a crime in New South Wales in 1983. The NSW law changed the next year, and I suspect Boy George deserves some small share of the credit.

Even if George has admitted in recent years to being “militantly gay”, his persona in 1982-84 was more ambiguous. All those jokes about whether he was boy or girl (as if he hadn’t headed them off at the pass with his stage name) raised questions about gender rather than sex and sexuality, even if the people telling them were aiming at the latter. Suddenly everyone was talking about “gender bending” and androgyny, and thinking about what our costumes said about us. George’s choices of costume were masterly: they weren’t drag or camp; they weren’t pirate or dandy highwayman; they were something we hadn’t seen before, and couldn’t easily place. Androgyny didn’t only offer new possibilities for non-straights, it offered them for straights as well, breaking old stereotypes and giving all of us permission to play with our appearance.

I was too geeky to take the opportunity, but when I went to matric (senior high) in 1984 I met a bunch of arty teenagers who had grabbed it with both hands. My old friends mostly dismissed them as “trendies”, but as the only one of us taking art that year I got to know a few of them. One in particular was a bit like a young Boy George: funny, arch, fashionable and, in his own art-studenty way, fearless. He wore pointy shoes when it was utterly unheard of, and dyed his hair in fox-like shades. I didn’t see much of him after that year, but his example prompted me to buy some bright yellow socks (and worse, some orange ones) that stayed in my wardrobe for a good few years. Whenever I hear Culture Club I think of him, and wonder where he ended up. (I know where the socks ended up.)

I’m still unsure whether my arty friend was gay; it was hard to tell if his girl friends were girlfriends. If he had been, he would have been an old hand at maintaining the mystery, because there was genuine risk in coming out in my home state: Tasmania was the last Australian state to have its laws prohibiting gay sex overturned (in 1997), and the last man jailed under them was arrested in December 1984 (he was sentenced to eight months for having sex in a car by the side of the road). It seems amazing that the state is now one of the national leaders in recognising same-sex partnerships, only a couple of decades on.

That context gives just about everything Boy George did in the early 1980s greater significance; this was a time when naive teenagers could be blind to the real meaning of Freddie Mercury’s leather trousers, let alone Rob Halford’s, but you certainly couldn’t ignore George. He showed us how dated the 1970s stereotypes already were, and how restricted in possibility.

With all of that going on it almost didn’t matter whether the music was any good, but of course if it hadn’t been he would hardly have gained such attention. Although I wasn’t a particular fan, you had to acknowledge the catchy charms of “Karma Chameleon”, even if we were all thoroughly sick of it by the end of its run. The synth harmonica sound would become far too familiar over the coming year or so, but it sounded fresh then. George rarely sounded happier, and the inanity of “War, war is stupid” was still in the future. My personal response to the song would be a 6 or a 7, but it deserves an 8 for what the band signified at that late-’83 moment.

The funny thing about the Boy George was that when I was eleven and twelve, and not yet capable of accepting that I was gay, I could completely ready to believe he was not sexual in any way. It was a comfort, really: I understood him as an example of how the big awful confusing subject of SEX (not to mention GAY SEX) (not to mention GAY SEX IN THE ERA OF AIDS) could actually be avoided.

Eventually I got over such squeamishness. Eventually.

Re #26 – Corny, corny corny corny, bullshit number one…

#27 – I hope you’re in agreement with me, because I’m right. I don’t give a f$%k if it went to #1. So did Debby Boone.

#31 – not really; see my elephant-in-the-room of a post at #23. I was just punnin’. I can see how some people wouldn’t like it (daft title, corny harmonica, George’s vocals were never all that), but it doesn’t set off my “gaaah” button the way that, say, “The War Song” does.

If you don’t get Rory’s reference, a mesmerising Channel 4 documentary last year showed how 8 November 1983 – while Culture Club were no 1 in Oz and the next entry over here – was the closest we’ve ever come to nuclear war. Senior figures in the Soviet Union had convinced themselves that they were about to come under nuclear attack from the West, and the vast Soviet nuclear arsenal of missiles, bombers and submarines were put on maximum alert, ready to launch a full retaliatory attack on Western Europe and the US. It was soon after the shooting down of the Korean airliner in Kamchatka, and NATO had just begun an exercise which rehearsed how to launch nuclear weapons…

As George didn’t quite say, “war is naughty / and people are naughty / and people who start wars should be sent to bed early”.

“Church” is great but I’m a bit surprised at the consensus regard on this thread for the noodly “Victims”.

‘Victims’ is great, not because of its noodliness, but because of the titanic scale of its moochiness, woundedness and sulkiness. If you think that the best thing about Boy George’s songwriting is in its portrayal of lovers hurting each others feelings – and the best thing about his singing is the ability to convey this hurt with a smoothness that belies the pain – then ‘Victims’ must be the definitive Culture Club song.

1984 is YEAR OF WAR, probably as a morphic field recoil to the unknown crisis Rory just posted about.

This is pretty much the first pop song I can remember but I have never liked it. There’s a very naff jauntiness about it that I find incredibly offputting.

The “titanic scale of its moochiness, woundedness and sulkiness” (very nice!) didn’t impress me about Victims when it came out. It was regarded as an “important” record by djs, press, C Club fans, and – not least of all – by George himself. I agree with Tom on its scattershot melody – I’ve heard it dozens of times and I still can’t remember how it goes beyond the opening lines. It’s no Say Hello Wave Goodbye, at any rate.

>>Rory – “For some reason I remembered the video as having George on an open-topped bus” maybe you are muddling this with the “Church of the Poison Mind” video where they are in an open top car? Ok, a convertible…

Didn’t The Style Council’s “Speak Like A Child” come out around this time? Seem to recall the video for that having Paul, Mick, Tracoe et al motoring around the countryside in an open-topped double decker…though mistaking P Wellerl for B George is a bit of a stretch 🙂

Never really cared too much for this soft little pop song. Never really had too much of an opinion of Boy George either, although, like many, I found much credit in “Victims” and “Church”. KC, though, seemed to spin itself off in to a MOR hinterland where the chorus is all-consuming and you either sing along to it a la “Yellow Submarine” and “Lily the Pink” or you keep your mouth shut and the record off. CLICK!