Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Cynthia Johnson
Saxophonist and singer Cynthia Johnson of the disco group "Lipps, Inc." poses for a portrait circa 1978.
Cynthia Johnson is the queen of Funkytown. She sang the track in Lipps, Inc.’s 1980 disco hit: talk about it talk about it talk about moo-oovin’. “Funkytown” is one of the most famous songs to ever come out of Minneapolis—it’s a platinum single, with millions of copies sold. Everyone knows its staccato strings, deep guitar licks, and sugary synth tune. But where is Funkytown, really? After a tumultuous few years with Lipps, Inc. and a lifetime at the heart of the Twin Cities’ music scene, Johnson has an answer: Funkytown is both a place and a state of mind.
She first found it in her family’s St. Paul living room, her brothers and sisters singing as summer thunderstorms crashed overhead, her mother white-knuckled in the candlelight.
“My mother had a fear of storms,” says Johnson. She’s 65 now, calling from her kitchen in Naperville, Illinois. “During the storms, she was real respectful of what God was doing. She would gather us all by candlelight, and teach us harmony, and church songs, and love songs. Some of my earliest memories are her teaching us how to sing, but it was all because of her fear. It would distract her.”
Johnson’s mother worked long days at Honeywell, and directed the church choir. Her father was a saxophone player—warm and loving, but always on the road. They divorced early. As a girl, Johnson trained her voice on church hymns, and later sang backup vocals in a band with her sisters. She learned the saxophone, and jammed with the homegrown musicians that lined her street in St. Paul’s Midway neighborhood. In 1972, she sang “Wings of a Dove” at a funeral for a friend who’d been shot. A high school classmate, Joey Kareem, approached her after the service. He asked if she’d like to join a band.
“He took me to the north side of Minneapolis. There were nine brothers there. They had an amazing horn section. And they didn't know that I played the saxophone—neither did Joey. He just knew that I had a voice,” says Johnson. The band was Flyte Tyme. Kareem introduced her to Terry Lewis, who played bass. (Famed producers Jam and Lewis played with Flyte Tyme as teenagers—later, their record studio took the name.) There was David Eiland on sax and Jellybean Johnson on drums, plus guitar, keys, and three horn players. Johnson brought her gospel-cut vocals, and her skill on the saxophone. Soon, they were making music.
Flyte Tyme practiced in the basement of Eiland’s parent’s house, playing heavy, brassy, danceable funk. They had to scrape for gigs—most white clubs wouldn’t hire them—so they did campus shows at Macalester, Morris, and Mankato, and played at bars like the Filling Station and the legendary Fox Trap. They competed in battles of the bands at The Way community center, the cultural heart of Minneapolis’s Near North neighborhood where teenage Prince, Morris Day, and André Cymone cut their teeth. The guys were older than Johnson, and sheltered her from the coarser elements of the music scene—they were a unit, she says, of solidarity and love. When they got on stage, horns wailing and drum beat driving them to a higher place, she was transported.
“It doesn't happen at every gig—some gigs you struggle, some gigs you have mental distraction. But there are those gigs that happen, where everybody is united. Where things just flow, like a spiritual, out of body experience that you don't have really any control over. You get swept away into something,” says Johnson. “I was truly a band chick. I never was a groupie. But I was a band chick who relied on all the pieces to take me to this Funkytown. … Flyte Tyme became that funky place.”
Then, they started to grow up. Johnson had gone to college at Morris, and needed to make some money. The guys in the band had started relationships and laid down roots, and she wanted the same for herself. She started wearing long gowns and singing at a club in White Bear Lake, her vocals soft and dreamy over jazz backing in a way funk had never allowed. She drifted away from Flyte Tyme, and eventually, Alexander O’Neal took her place. Not long after, Johnson got a call from a wedding DJ turned music producer named Steven Greenberg. He was testing out disco tunes, and needed somebody to hit the high notes.
Johnson came into Sound 80 Studios and recorded Greenberg’s demo, which later became Lipps, Inc.’s first album, Mouth to Mouth. She had been in the studio before, with Terry Lewis and Prince, when they were teenagers. (Flyte Tyme had a friendly rivalry with Grand Central, Prince’s band.) But this session felt different, almost sterile—the warmth, the chatting, and the mugs of tea weren’t there. “Funkytown” rides on Johnson’s vocals, her exuberance and untamed funk. But she sang it over a track, alone in the recording booth.
“It was like doing a jingle, a commercial jingle, which is way different than a studio session with musicians. It was just myself, the producer, and the engineer,” says Johnson. “Even though it was sterile, there was beauty in the musical experience. But I had to get lost in the track.” She asked the engineer to turn up the music, closed her eyes, and traveled somewhere she knew well: up on stage with Flyte Tyme, back in that funky place.
Thus began Lipps, Inc. The band’s ethos was, as Johnson says: business, possibility, money. Music for the sake of music. The camaraderie and the love that had defined Flyte Tyme weren’t there. But there was chemistry—Greenberg’s songs were a perfect fit for Johnson’s crystalline vocals. She had fun with disco, and brought a gospel verve to Lipps, Inc.’s clean-cut synth tracks. “Funkytown” was a smash hit: it spent four weeks at #1 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100, and topped disco charts in the UK and Sweden, skyrocketing the song to fame. When the band gigged around town, Johnson sang with a “Funkytown”-inscribed suitcase in hand.
Then music videos for “Funkytown” materialized. One features three Black women dancing and lip syncing. Another spotlights a white British woman named Debbie Jenner, who was reportedly hired to be the face of Lipps, Inc. in West Germany and the Netherlands. Hers is the video that came to be associated with “Funkytown”: Jenner go-go dances and mimes to the vocals in a pink jumpsuit. On the Mouth to Mouth cover, too, are two white faces, jets of light streaming between their teeth. When “Funkytown” made it big, Greenberg was whisked away to LA to celebrate. But Johnson, erased from visual materials, received little recognition. Later, she fought to get on the inner jacket of Lipps, Inc.’s second album, then finally the cover of their third.
“It felt malicious (who puts strangers in a video and not the lead contracted vocalist) [plus] not being considered for the LP cover, and instead opting to have white cartoon faces on the album cover,” says Johnson. “It was quite a slap in the face, on many levels. Because I had never been in a musical experience that wasn’t based on inclusivity for the sake of inclusivity.” She’s still unsure who gave the green light for the videos, but she knows one thing: no one asked for her approval.
At the same time, Johnson was pregnant and newly married to an abusive husband, trapped in his patterns of control. Fighting the production company took a backseat to surviving her marriage. Suddenly, all of life felt unnavigable: Lipps, Inc. was a decent paycheck, but the battles were wearing her down. The sustaining love she’d once found in music, the very thing that fueled Flyte Tyme, had evaporated. She was cut off from the rest of her scene, too—her contract kept her from playing other gigs.
“There was no chance of me being me. I had to recognize that. I felt damned if I did, and damned if I didn’t,” says Johnson. “I felt like I was in a land that I didn't belong in. I needed to get back to Funkytown.”
So she left. Johnson got a release from her contract with Lipps, Inc., and ended her marriage. She dedicated herself to caring for her new baby daughter. She started gigging again, with live bands and as a session musician. She hooked back up with Jam and Lewis, who by then were touring with Prince as his opening act—Flyte Tyme had become the Time, with Morris Day on lead vocals. Johnson featured on a Herb Alpert album, and worked with artists like Chico Debarge, Stacy Lattisaw, and Brown Mark. She sang with Sounds of Blackness, the Grammy-winning Black music choir founded at Macalester College.
All the love she’d been missing, that wild rush of feeling on the stage, came back. She healed. Retracing her steps years back, Johnson re-entered the world of street dances, underground clubs, and studio sessions, finding acceptance and celebration. In other words, it's where she had found Funkytown again—it was in Minneapolis’s vibrant funk, soul, and R&B scene, right where Flyte Tyme had started.
“Oh my goodness girl, it was a love overload,” says Johnson. “There was so much music. So many bands. There was Haze, Good Vibrations with Rocky Robinson. There was George Pettis, who toured with Whitney Houston.” The list goes on: Pierre Lewis and The Lewis Connection, Wee Willie Walker, Kathleen Bradford Johnson, Alexander O’Neal. “There were fans everywhere, there were horn players, and there was jazz. There were artists, dancers, there was everything. I found jubilation.”
Like Flyte Tyme, many of the Twin Cities’ Black musicians faced discrimination from club owners, who systematically tourniqueted the downtown music circuit. (Clubs that did hire Black bands were often raided and closed.) Johnson recalls that Haze was one of the only Black bands that played at First Avenue (then called Sam’s) thanks to their large white following. Cut off from the main venues, Black artists created a thriving underground scene, especially in North Minneapolis: they recorded albums, filled up bars, and played for street dances in the summertime. As local music journalist Andrea Swensson has documented, through the 50s, 60s, 70s and beyond, the metro’s Black musicians were at work hammering out the Minneapolis sound, that unique funk rock groove that eventually gave rise to Prince’s stardom. Steven Greenberg wrote “Funkytown” about leaving Minneapolis, where he said the scene was bland, too vanilla. Johnson disagrees.
“He didn’t come from my hood. In my hood, it was funky,” says Johnson. “In my hood, the garages and the basements from St. Paul to Minneapolis were littered with players and musicians and singers, and the churches were alive with music. We were from different sides of the tracks.” Greenberg’s story was the narrative, she says—but it wasn’t hers. “I had to take my funky experience, and put it into Funkytown. And my thoughts were on Flyte Tyme … and the first time we recorded an album—the love and the trance, the formation of the spiritual connection, that music that touched my soul. It was quite funky.”
And still today, Johnson says, Funkytown is alive and well in Minneapolis and St. Paul. She sang a reunion concert with Flyte Tyme at the 2018 Super Bowl, where they played a brassy, funk-jam version of Lipps, Inc.’s one hit. “This is the new Funkytown,” Johnson told the stadium, laying fresh claim to the song and re-establishing the Twin Cities as one of the funkiest towns on earth. But these days, she doesn’t keep up too much with the local scene. She’s off singing gigs in Mexico City and Sydney, and writing a book, From Funkytown to Higher Ground. She released a solo album, All That I Am, a few years back. Johnson is also a major foodie—she teaches whole food classes at wellness centers, where no one knows she ever sang a platinum disco hit. There’s a certain freedom in that anonymity, she says, that she loves.
But “Funkytown” was released 41 years ago, which seems ample time to give credit where credit’s due. The song is still in the public consciousness, soundtracking everything from Shrek 2 to Black Mirror in more recent years—but what makes it so irresistible? The opening vocals are filtered through a vocoder, rendering them almost inhuman, machine-like. But when the chorus starts unencumbered by vocal effects and we travel to Funkytown, we owe it to Cynthia: won’t you take me to Funkytown. Transported herself, she makes us feel something—that jubilation. That funk.
