Consumer Guide Album

Gap Band: The Best of Gap Band: 20th Century Masters: The Millennium Collection [Mercury, 2001]
Bootsy's cousins and Leon Russell's proteges, the three brothers Wilson were as bland as the two Brothers Johnson until an accidental 1980 P-Funk rip we'll call "Oops Upside Your Head" transformed them into a great funk band for a handful of silly singles. No champs at hands-on bass and drums, they power-tooled a futuristic electrofunk out of keyboards, sound effects, and overdubbed trackmastery--think "Burn Rubber," "You Dropped a Bomb on Me"--well before Bowie's "Let's Dance" or Clinton's "Last Dance." I miss "Beep a Freak," which used a beeper as a rhythm instrument (eep!), and the payday throwaway they wrote for Keenan Ivory Wayans one night. But mainly I wish they'd escaped the African American superstition that ballads are old-age insurance. Two too many show up here--which is seven or eight fewer than on the new Ultimate Collection, which to squeeze them in eviscerates the classics down to radio length. A−