One person’s view: “Sex songs work when they’re subtle, not blatantly disgusting. And it’s not just the lyrics that makes this song so punishing. The musical content is even worse. ... In fact, every part of this song is pure sensory abuse.” – JudaiKitsune @ Deviant Art
The public’s view: 3.02 / 5.00
For every massively overplayed song like “Sometimes When We Touch”, there were five or ten other hit records that I rarely heard on the radio at all. Foxy’s “Get Off” is a prime example. I never once encountered it on my local stations in 1978. I even missed its appearance on Casey Kasem’s New Year’s Eve countdown of the biggest singles of the year, as I mentioned on my other blog, due to a badly timed bout with church. By the time I finally did get to experience “Get Off”, many years later, I didn’t at first recognize it as the top ten hit by Foxy that had evaded my eardrums for so long. I thought maybe it was a new record by Rick James, and that its creation was the result of an especially potent batch of drugs. I was wrong about “Get Off” having anything to do with Rick James, but wasn’t too far off about the drugs.
Foxy was a Miami disco-funk band led by a man named Ish Ledesma. The average Miami disco-funk band tends to party pretty hard when given the chance, and Foxy was above average. Although “Get Off” has been condemned as being too explicit for the 1970s, the band was simply singing about the lifestyle that they knew. If anything, the line about “peeking under the sheets with two lovelies” describes a slow night for these guys. Also, nowhere in the song do they mention the huge joint that Ledesma and his temporary bandmate Carl Driggs smoked while writing it. In my opinion, the Moral Majority should have given them a medal for the restraint that they showed with these lyrics.
We know about the genesis of this song, and the magical fat doobie that contributed to it, because of a monologue that Ish Ledesma posted on YouTube. In this video, Ledesma confirms what many people have suspected: “Get Off” was deliberately engineered to be annoying. Specifically, the police-siren-like whooping noises were intended to aggravate a rude Maryland nightclub owner named Pete. Pete had stated that he did not wish to hear any such irritating sounds while Foxy was playing at his establishment. When the group defiantly launched into its debut performance of “Get Off”, Pete’s bouncers carried Ledesma off the stage after the first whoop. He was dumped unceremoniously on the ground outside the building, along with Foxy’s gear, narrowly avoiding an unwanted baptism in a nearby bay. It was then that he knew he had a hit, and that the band needed to get into the studio right away to record it.
The racy lyrics and the whooping are not the only parts of “Get Off” that push people’s anger buttons. The song is a non-stop barrage of sonic weirdness, and it isn’t even a particularly original brand of weirdness. The whooping was nothing new, having already been done in the Michael Zager Band’s “Let’s All Chant”. There’s also a talk box solo that sounds like Peter Frampton having a very bad day, and a repeated synth noise that is like the duck from “Disco Duck” quacking into a kazoo. All of it somehow comes together to make a usable party record, but not in my town. We were still partying to “Sometimes When We Touch”.
There was no MTV in 1978, but that didn’t stop Foxy from making two videos for their hit song – both of which are far funnier than anything I could possibly write here. Many of the vocals in “Get Off” were provided by a trio of ladies called Wildflower, but the label apparently didn’t want to pay these women to appear anywhere with the rest of the group. Thus the men in Foxy were forced to lip-synch the female parts in the videos, with unintentionally hilarious results.
Ish Ledesma and Carl Driggs also failed to coordinate their attire for one of these video spectacles, as seen below. Ledesma wore his usual “Florida man” tank top while Driggs showed up in dress clothes, a poorly sized necktie, and heavy makeup, looking and dancing like a slightly less awkward version of Donald Trump. Yet, Foxy does not win the award for Most Embarrassingly Humorous Musical Stage Production of 1978. Barry Manilow snags that trophy for his outlandish performance in the video for “Copacabana”. He was singing about a showgirl and he just about tried to be one too.
My rating: 6 / 10
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