Illegal Foreign Object

The doctor vaccinated me with a phonograph needle at the age of five. I remember the year because I remember the song that emptied the syringe into my arm, forever turning me into an unabashed music nerd. A day after my fifth birthday, the Pointer Sisters released the album So Excited!. The single, “I’m So Excited”, a keys-driven pop masterpiece replete with separate piano, organ, and synth grooves (and a killer outro duel between the horns and vocals) made me wanna shake my butt and run around the room. It’s the first time I can recall music taking physical control of me.

Sometime after that, my mom got me a Fisher Price record player and the album Urban Chipmunk. Alvin & The Chipmunks singing country songs?! 🎶Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be chipmunks…🎶

I became obsessed with that record player. If I played with Masters Of The Universe action figures, I’d put on my MOTU story record and act out the tale with the toys. My dad had a Kenny Rogers’ 20 Greatest Hits album that I wore out. Forty years later, I still love the song “Coward Of The County”. Someone had given my parents Jimi Hendrix’s Axis: Bold As Love as a wedding gift. They’d never even taken it out of the plastic! The cover art had me transfixed, but “Exp” weirded me out so much that I stopped the album and put it back where I found it. My ears weren’t yet ready for Jimi! 

Just one year later, in 1983, the Pointer Sisters were at it again with the sugary but sinister Break Out. Despite the sisters’ dislike of the album title (“We kept thinking of it as a rash or jail,” said Ruth Pointer), the album was a smash, buoyed by three inescapable singles, “Jump (For My Love)” (the video for which was used as a sort of ’84 Olympics promotional piece), “Automatic” (their highest-charting single), and the Danny Sembello/Allee Willis-penned “Neutron Dance” (which got a nice boost from the Beverly Hills Cop movie). The Pointer Sisters blew up so big that Break Out was re-released in ’84 to include a remixed version of “I’m So Excited”. The song went to No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100. In under a year, the Pointer Sisters scored four Top 10 singles.

I remain a godless whore for catchy pop music. When I stumble into a bad mood, groups like the Pointer Sisters are almost always the audio salve I apply to my mental wounds. Their infectious brand of synth-pop is a guaranteed smile.

Track List:

1. Jump (For My Love) 10/10
2. Automatic 10/10
3. Baby Come And Get It 7/10
4. I Need You 6/10
5. Dance Electric 7/10
6. Neutron Dance 10/10
7. Easy Persuasion 6/10
8. Nightline 8/10
9. Telegraph Your Love 6/10
10. Operator 6/10
11. I’m So Excited* 10/10

Grade: 78

*Bonus track included on the ’84 re-release.