Do YOU Remember???

With today being the 21st, I’d be remiss to not pay my respects to the greatest song ever recorded – Earth, Wind and Fire’s smash single “September.” This is the definition of a song that fucks and fucks hard. Probably my coldest take is that there has never been a better song than this. I’ve never met anyone who reacted anything less than jubilant when this came on, whether it be at a wedding, a bar mitzvah, a box social, doesn’t matter. This song doesn’t put asses in the seats, it gets asses up outta their seats. People who can’t even dance find themselves dancing to this. It’s infectious. It invokes something deep inside all of us that I can’t quite explain. Maybe it’s the horns, maybe it’s the pleasant riff that kicks the whole thing off, or maybe it’s the fact the chorus has little-to-no actual lyrics.

From an interview with Allee Willis, co-writer with Earth, Wind & Fire:

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“The, kind of, go-to phrase that Maurice used in every song he wrote was ‘ba-dee-ya,’ ” she says. “So right from the beginning he was singing, ‘Ba-dee-ya, say, do you remember / Ba-dee-ya, dancing in September.’ And I said, ‘We are going to change ‘ba-dee-ya’ to real words, right?’ ”

Wrong. Willis says that at the final vocal session she got desperate and begged White to rewrite the part.

“And finally, when it was so obvious that he was not going to do it, I just said, ‘What the f*** does ‘ba-dee-ya’ mean?’ And he essentially said, ‘Who the f*** cares?'” she says. “I learned my greatest lesson ever in songwriting from him, which was never let the lyric get in the way of the groove.”

Don’t you ever, and I mean NEVER, get in the way of a good groove. Or, in millennial speak: Bitch, don’t kill my vibe.

My only complaint with this song is it’s only a shade longer than three and a half minutes. And it fades out, with jamming very clearly still taking place in that studio. I would very much appreciate the 20 minute extended version whenever EWF feels like releasing that for public consumption.