 The Ritchie Family This album takes me back to my younger years, enjoying good company, great music, and pleasurable anal sex with a faceless string of lovers on the French Antilles. The late and underappreciated Jacques Morali rubber-stamped this and at least ten other disco "hits" for every Village People album you can name, yet somehow people only seem to remember the group with the cowboy, the Indian, the hot cop, the construction worker, and the biker. The Ritchie Family is probably the second biggest jewel in Morali's crown, a trio of fine black ladies who released about 6 or 7 albums in disco's heyday, with various line-ups and no respect for personnel continuity. In many ways, the Ritchie Family was as faceless as most of the cock I sucked in the 70s, and just about as tasty. The album's two sides each contain two medleys, with a total of five songs on the album. Side One features "Big Spender/Good in Love/Music Man" which taken together is a nonstop boogie-thon that'll have you sucking up the poppers and searching for your own "big spender" or "music man" to be "good in love" with. Sure, it's pretty paint-by-numbers, but it succeeds precisely because it has no pretensions toward art, like too many of my 80s toyboys. The medley "American Generation/I Feel Disco Good" is a true classic; I sometimes hear it in the futuristic cities of my dreams, its pulsating blend of Village People backbeat and Abba harmonies providing maximum camp and 100% pure enjoyment. Sure you can see the dollar signs in Jacques' eyes in every beat, but you still "can't stop" loving this album.
Review by Acé Mania |