Lipps, Inc.

Disco was a singles genre. It turned an album-oriented era upside down by revealing a simple truth: Sometimes one song is all it takes. That’s certainly all that Lipps, Inc. needed to secure their own legacy in pop culture: “Funkytown” is one of a handful of songs so universally beloved that it is practically synonymous with disco, itself. But the tune didn’t come out of a New York hit factory. In the late ’70s, Minneapolis producer/songwriter Steven Greenberg, a former wedding DJ, hooked up with singer Cynthia Johnson, who had been working with an early version of Morris Day’s group, The Time. Their debut single, 1979’s “Rock It,” landed on the hip Casablanca label and boasted a sleek electronic pulse in keeping with the fashionable cybernetic grooves Giorgio Moroder had only recently pioneered. On Lipps, Inc.’s follow-up, they added modest tweaks to the same essential formula, fleshing out bold string vamps with jangling guitar and playful cowbell patterns that captured the era’s disco at its most vividly kinetic. Perhaps the masterstroke was to structure it as though it were two songs in one, playing the verse off the bridge in such a way that gave radio listeners a taste of DJ culture right in their own homes or cars. Between 1980 and 1983, Lipps, Inc. would release three more albums full of lush, innovative dance singles—like the vocoder-soaked “Hold Me Down” or the almost New Wave-flavoured “Designer Music”—that helped pave the way for Minneapolis’ electro-funk explosion. Detroit techno innovator Carl Craig even borrowed an alias from “Designer Music”—confirming that Lipps, Inc. were more than just one-hit wonders.