Whenever I tell someone that I'm a fan of KC and the Sunshine Band, or that I enjoy attending their concerts, I always get the same reaction. "Their lyrics were so repetitive. You know, "Shake shake shake, shake shake shake, shake your booty, shake your booty" or "Keep it comin' love, keep it comin' love, keep it comin' love, keep it comin' love," usually accompanied by a little dance.

Those music snobs don't realize they just did exactly what Harry Wayne Casey intended. They sang the song verbatim. They remembered the song because of the repetition.

I had meant to fill this page with an impassioned defense of the KC lyric pattern, even including references to Pentecostal call-and-response church music and to George Frederick Handel's Messiah, which consists of short pieces with limited lyrics repeated over and over.

But instead, I thought KC himself could explain the reasoning behind his lyrics, as told to Barry Scott in his 1994 book "We Had Joy, We Had Fun: The Lost Recording Artists of the Seventies."

"They were deliberately written to sound commercial. The repetition was deliberately put in there. I remember working at retail, people came in and they wouldn't know the name of a song. I know that if you go in and ask for a record and they say they don't know the title either, you've lost the sale. So I wanted to make sure that everyone knew the name of our records. When they came and asked for it, there was no doubt in anyone's mind what the record was and who it was by. No problem with 'Shake Your Booty' or 'That's the way, uh huh uh huh, I like it' or whatever."

I guess it's easy to overlook good business savvy, uh huh uh huh?

(c) 2003 Becky Banfield for Dos Gardenias Productions