They Call It Herbie Hancock's Worst Album
The confusing disco funk of Feets Don't Fail Me Now
Toward the end of the 1970s, a lot of jazz musicians who had become jazz fusion musicians became disco and disco funk musicians. This displeased some fans. Herbie Hancock made a name for himself on the more avant-grade end of the jazz spectrum, both as a leader and member of other collectives, including a stint with the Miles Davis Quintet. So when he started fooling around with synths and vocoders and disco beats, a good many eyes rolled. Another one lost to the pursuit of disco glam and fame. For me, my first encounter with Herbie Hancock came the same way it did for just about every kid who grew up in the 1980s: the electrofunk megahit “Rockit.” That’s pretty much all I knew about Hancock for years. It wasn’t until some time in college that I discovered before “Rockit,” he’d been “a jazz guy.”
As a result, exploring his electrofunk and disco era isn’t particularly traumatizing for me the way it seems to be for some. He made some pretty good records during this phase, but while 1979’s Feets Don't Fail Me Now isn’t as bad as “the worst thing Herbie Hancock ever did,” I’m still not sure I’d call it good. Or would I? For a lot of it, I find myself just sort of sitting there, wondering what’s going on, but not in a cosmic, transcendent, challenging way. More in a, “I wonder what Herbie was thinking this song accomplished” way. In a way, I think this album may be more avant-garde than people give it credit for, although it’s buried beneath layers of late ‘70s production.
Take the album opener, "You Bet Your Love." It kicks off with a pretty standard disco beat. A little thin, maybe, but not bad. You can nod your head to it. Then come the vocals, heavily manipulated, sounding less like futuristic robot and more like someone drowning. It’s not catchy, it’s not really danceable. It almost seems like the song playing in the background and Hancock’s vocals have nothing to do with one another. The background bangs, and there’s some great keyboard playing and a serviceable if uninspired beat, but then there are those strangled, meandering vocals, almost like Hancock is purposefully undermining his own disco beat. The whole thing is just sort of…unpleasant. It’s the disco equivalent of a dream where you are trying to run but can never move any faster than a heavy plod. It’s a bad trip, man.
"You Bet Your Love"is followed by the balladesque "Trust Me, " which also just feels off. Once again, the instrumentation is good, trending toward the city pop or “featured in a scene from Miami Vice” sound that would become popular in the 1980s. It’s not a bad song, but it is a little bit dull, and the strange production on the vocals renders it a little sinister. Plus, Herbie Hancock is still Herbie Hancock, so once again the keyboard solos are solid. “Ready or Not” busts out of the gate with a funky beat. It’s a fairly predictable song, but it’s at least successful as a dancefloor booty shaker. Hancock’s weird vocodered vocals are notably absent from the song. "Tell Everybody" is also a more successful song, though it also sounds like Hancock was high in a room full of special effects and musical toys. So you get the robot voice and random “pew pew” electronic noises, but somehow it works out pretty well if all you want to do is space out and hit the dancefloor. If you’re not dancing, well then, it’s overlong and repetitive, but sometimes a song has a single purpose.
“Honey from the Jar” is an earthier jam with a meaty, funky bass line that sounds like Fat Albert characters walking down the street, and then it settles into a “Funkadelic but if Funkadelic were robots instead of cosmic superheroes” groove. After taking a break for a couple of tracks, the murky, disjointed vocoder vocals are back. It’s weird, and it was at this point that I started thinking there was more going on with Feets Don’t Fail Me Now than just a stab at disco dollars. In its strange, overproduced way, Feets is like a collision of disco commercialism with freeform jazz strangeness. "Knee Deep" is a funky mood setter, but it’s again more suited for walking down the street than dancing, continuing this album’s awkward identity crisis. It has the most overt jazz sound to it, thanks largely to Bennie Maupin’s soprano saxophone solo.
Funk, fusion, and disco produced a lot of weird stuff, but this one is really weird. And it’s really weird dressed up in pretty normal (for 1979) clothes. Or, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just not very good. The fact that I’m not sure keeps me interested, and it keeps me listening to the album a lot more often than I would had it been a more conventional, better disco album. For as much as is going on, the production often sounds thin. But just as I screw up my face and think I don’t like this album, something will happen that makes me happy, or if not happy, at least gets me interested. It’s all very confusing, and I suppose I enjoy that aspect of it. Rarely can you call a disco album confusing.
There’s some genuinely solid music here, but there’s also some haphazard, off-balance stuff, especially when those vocoder vocals kick in. Some decent funk grooves, some danceable disco beats, and some “what the fuck am I listening to?” There’s even a tinny whisper of Gary Numan-esque electro-minimalism. I guess where I end up is, if you like funk, disco, and/or ‘80s-style synth-driven “plastic pop,” this is an interesting and at times baffling record, even if you don’t like it—and even when it’s not that interesting. Which is…man, I think Herbie Hancock broke my brain with the album most people claim has the least going on.