The Gap Band – You Dropped a Bomb on Me
1982
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Best comments
1.“WARNING: Listening to even 30 seconds of this song will make roller skates magically appear on your feet.”
More comments
- 2.“I went to a high school football game last Friday, and the cheerleaders performed a routine to this. I thought it was great, because at least one of their parents had to have been conceived while their grandparents were listening to this.”
- 3.“GAP stands for Greenwood, Archer and Pine – the streets where bombs were dropped on the Black community of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921. The band members grew up in Tulsa and paid homage to them in this song... although they had to camouflage it.”
The story
Before they were The Gap Band, they were the Greenwood, Archer and Pine Street Band, named for a stretch of their hometown, Tulsa, Oklahoma. Too long for a marquee. They cut it to the G.A.P. Street Band, and a typo finished the job. Brothers Charlie, Ronnie and Robert Wilson ran with it.
Their bomb song came out in August 1982 on Gap Band IV, and it's synth-funk at its most cartoonish: a synthesizer whistles like a falling bomb, timpani rumble, then the groove goes off. It reached number two on the Black singles chart and number 31 on the Hot 100, and in 2022 Rolling Stone ranked it 96th among the greatest dance songs ever.
The video takes the title completely literally. Neon-animated warplanes run bombing raids, Charlie Wilson throws his whole body into the dance moves, and the brothers wear matching camouflage, because of course they do. It ends with Charlie and a female dancer. A love song dressed up as an air raid.
For years a rumor tied the song to the Tulsa race massacre. In 2021 Charlie Wilson said that wasn't true, though he was glad the rumor got people talking about what happened there. After 9/11, Clear Channel put it on its famous list of questionable songs. Forty-plus years on, it still clears a dance floor in the best way.
