DeBarge – Rhythm Of The Night
#quotefromthe80s
Well I know a place where we can dance all night away
Underneath electric stars
Just come with me and we can shake your blues right away
You'll be doing fine when the music starts
To the beat of the rhythm of the night
#DeBarge #RhythmOfTheNight
March 1985 ended with the release of a song that would follow us during the whole spring, and came out on the same day as “Imagination“, by Belouis Some, but on the other side of the ocean.
We learned about a new group, the DeBarge, who had already had some success in America, someone more someone less. Yes, because the DeBarges got inspiration from the Jacksons, being all members of the same family. Their story is not a good story, I must say. The DeBarge’s father (this is their real surname) has been accused by his wife and children of violence and abuse, and has forced his wife to have about ten children.
The children grew up as they could, but fortunately they found inspiration in the church choir, and this led many of them to music or playing instruments. And in their twenties they created the DeBarge group; sometimes a brother left for some trouble and another had grown up in the meantime and came in.
Two notable presences were undoubtedly El DeBarge (full name Eldra), moustache, curly hair, and falsetto voice, and Bunny (real name Etterlene, like her mother), the older sister of all other brothers, who was kind of the director of the group even if she was not a solo voice.
Among the other brothers, James had a moment of notoriety for his marriage to Janet Jackson. They parted within a year.
“Rhythm of the Night” took DeBarge to the top of the charts and temporarily distanced them from their troubles, but in some way it also marked their fate. In fact, the record companies realized that El and Bunny could aspire to slightly more ambitious solo careers.
Gradually, however, the family group slipped, also because every now and then someone had different projects or various problems, and all in all their success lasted a couple of years and songs, before being sucked into a life far from easy. El himself had to stop a tour during the 1990s due to personal problems and addictions. He also set up a family of ten or twelve between marriages.
The song, however, was not bad at all, and both in the lyrics and in the video I would say that it was very inspired by “All night long” by Lionel Richie, with the necessary differences in level, of course. Anyway, despite their delicate history and many of their problems, DeBarge certainly managed to leave their mark in the music of the 80s!
DeBarge on Wikipedia
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