Cameo
In 1974 a fourteen-piece New York outfit called the New York City Players renamed itself Cameo after a trademark dispute with a similarly named act on the label that carried the Ohio Players. Drummer and singer Larry Blackmon, who trained as a percussionist at Juilliard, was clerking at a clothing store when he heard the group's 1977 single "Rigor Mortis" on the radio and quit on the spot. By 1981 he was tired of hauling a twelve-piece band around on shrinking margins; he cut Cameo down to a lean trio, moved the operation to Atlanta, and started his own label, Atlanta Artists, aiming to build "another Motown Records." That gamble produced the stripped-down, drum-machine-driven "Word Up!" (1986). Critics have long filed early Cameo's sci-fi costumes and horn-heavy sprawl under George Clinton's Parliament-Funkadelic; Blackmon rejects the comparison. "That George Clinton thing should die," he has said. "I can't see any comparison."
On "Word Up!" (1986), Larry Blackmon delivers the title hook in a guttural half-bark, the vocal tic that made the record instantly recognizable. The music blog Maxazine reports Blackmon "drew inspiration for the growling, restrained vocal style from his hero Sly Stone," and the trivia site Songfacts separately credits the same source: he "got the idea for the guttural vocal from Sly Stone." Neither outlet catches Blackmon saying so himself, but it isn't a stray guess — in a 1987 interview he named Sly Stone among the artists he cited when pressed on influences, the one name from that list anyone has since tied to an actual technique.
listen forCue up "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)" and listen to how Sly Stone treats the title phrase: he half-shouts it in a scraped, rasped register, more percussive bark than melody, riding a popped-bass groove that never lets the vocal settle into a tune. "Word Up!" pushes that same idea further — Blackmon barks the hook in an almost identical rasp, using his voice as another drum hit inside the arrangement rather than a lead. Two decades apart, the same choice: a rasp passed down like an heirloom, chosen over a clean, sung melody because it hits harder in the mix.