“Super Freak” is the 1981 single by American singer Rick James, co-written with Alonzo Miller and released on his fifth album, Street Songs. It is one of his signature records. In the lyric, “freak” means someone sexually adventurous. The line “She’s a very kinky girl / The kind you don’t take home to mother” put the kinky girl on mainstream radio. For people who follow kink in pop history, this funk single did that decades before the later wave of soft BDSM romance novels.
The song’s critical standing is not small. On Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs list it sat at 477 in 2004 and 481 in 2010, then jumped to 153 on the 2021 revision. In 1982 it was nominated for the Grammy for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance. For more than forty years after that, the super-freak persona kept circulating through samples by MC Hammer, Jay-Z, the Black Eyed Peas, and Nicki Minaj.
The track was cut between December 1980 and January 1981 at the Record Plant in Sausalito, California, and at Motown / Hitsville U.S.A. Recording Studios in Hollywood. Background vocals came from James’s Motown labelmates the Temptations — bass singer Melvin Franklin was one of his idols — and from Canadian singer Taborah Johnson. Oscar Alston played bass. The tenor saxophone solo by Stone City Band member Daniel LeMelle is still the passage that holds the song’s swagger. James improvised the lyrics. Los Angeles DJ Alonzo Miller then cleaned them up and took a co-writing credit for the job. The cleaned version is radio-ready kink bragging, not the fully naked lines of a club. James was reportedly not especially excited about the song. He did want something on the album that white folks could dance to. The pull between underground freak energy and Motown dance-floor ambition is part of why the record still holds up. It sells adventure, not an apology.
The original had a strong run on the U.S. dance chart and is often counted among the number-one dance singles of 1981. In 2006 the Dutch group Beatfreakz covered it as “Superfreak.” That single reached number 7 on the UK Singles Chart and number 6 in both Finland and Hungary. The cover was recorded at Beatfreakz Studios in Weesp, Netherlands. The sample replays were done at Scorccio.com Studio in Barcelona. Credits on the Dutch and UK CD1 list Sandro on lead vocals, Jassy and Tamar Husk on additional vocals, Beatfreakz on production, Hal Ritson on vocal production, Mark Summers on sample-replay production, Ben Cook as executive producer, Dipesh Parmar as executive production assistant, and Antonio Petronzio on photography. A quarter century after Motown funk sold the super freak to pop radio, the riff was still moving European dance floors.
