 The Ritchie Family The Village People may have provided the soundtrack to your dad's no-longer-mentioned days as a connoisseur of the San Francisco bathhouse scene, but the Ritchie Family did the same thing for your mom's wild, boozy nights trawling sub-Chippendale's strip clubs to feed her ravenous appetite for unleashed man-meat. Bad Reputation is the Family's seediest offering, finding the girls clad in leather on the cover, surrounded by a cadre of Speedo-clad beefcake boys. It's crystal clear what the girls are in the mood for on this one. "Put Your Feet to the Beat" is predictably anthemic "get up on your feet"-style disco, until a funkier variant of Peter Frampton's vocoder guitar style creeps in. You think it's just there for a solo, then it just stays there, noodling through the rest of the song. Every Ritchie Family album has one clear standout, and here it's the title track, which manages to use a weird reversed-out rip-off of the bendy guitar riff from "These Boots Are Made For Walkin'" (going up instead of down), and a straight cop from "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" in the chorus, in a steamy disco stew simultaneously silly and soulful. Side 2 dispenses with the foreplay and storms right into the VIP room, where anything goes. Here, the Ritchies break out the more familiar second-tier Village People sound with "It's a Man's World" (not the James Brown song) blatantly rewriting "Go West," medleyed with the laser-drum-fixated "Where Are the Men," which sounds more like a very horny Pointer Sisters, and then onto the epic "Sexy Man," which also rewrites "Go West," and which just begs for a montage of bachelorette party degeneracy to instantly enter your mind, with tattooed hardbodies dangling their whipped-cream-covered cocks in drunken ladies' faces. Can Mozart say he ever conveyed this image? Nope … but then, he didn't have the greater genius of Jaques Morali for inspiration and guidance. So it was up to the Ritchie Family to give us our "Eine Kleine Sexmusik."
Review by Brother Samuel |