‘Yeah’: Did Eddie Murphy somehow assemble the greatest band in history for a novelty song?
Time never looks that fondly on musical vanity projects. While most musicians want to make art in the studio, it’s obvious that some ideas would never work before anyone wrote a single song. But how was Eddie Murphy of all people able to assemble one of the greatest ensembles of all time for his album?
Because if you really think about the amount of iconic moments that Murphy has brought to pop culture, his reputation as a singer ranks below even his most notable flops. Everyone may have fond memories of listening to the song ‘Party All the Time’ and getting a good laugh out of Axel Foley trying to sing, but if you were to single out a moment where he was actually performing music, most people would flock to either his various songs in Shrek or him in a prison cell jamming out to The Police’s ‘Roxanne’.
But to his credit, Murphy was sincere about his craft, and he at least seemed to try to switch it up across his three albums. So Happy is a decent slice of 1980s funk, even if he’s trying as hard as he can to sound like Prince, but Love’s Alright is a truly mystifying album to tackle. There are a lot of ways to describe what Murphy does, but his turn as an enlightened hippy was never going to work, especially since the image everyone had of him was the man in the suit in Delirious making jokes about Mr T.
For all the strange vibes coming off the album, though, Murphy called in every single favour he had for this record. ‘Whatzupwitu’ is already elevated considering its brilliant Michael Jackson feature on the chorus, but all of the great cameos on the record were reserved for the track ‘Yeah’, which is among the finest supergroups ever made.
Oh, you think Paul McCartney made a decent-sized supergroup for his song ‘Rockestra Theme’? Well, Murphy’s roster has enough familiar faces to match the Beatle, including some of the greatest singers of all time harmonising with him. Aside from the biggest names in R&B like MJ, Janet Jackson, MC Hammer and Babyface, some of the greatest artists you would have never expected appear on the song as well, from Elton John to Macca to Barry White, with Stevie Wonder coming in to blow some harmonica on the tail end of the track.
So if there are this many legends on a single track, naturally it should be one of the strongest on the album, right? Nope. Despite being one of the cornerstone songs on the album, ‘Yeah’ kicks off the record and spends its entire four minutes and forty-four seconds documenting everyone singing the word ‘yeah’ as soulfully as they can while Murphy adds a handful of ad-libs in the middle of everything.
Knowing what he was known for, this could have been one of the biggest jokes that Murphy could have pulled, but that’s thrown out the window when the rest of the album is all about peace, love, and happiness. This is supposed to be some spiritual exercise on his part, so getting the biggest names in music together to do what is essentially an impromptu choir practice feels like a huge missed opportunity.
Maybe this was supposed to be the sounds of musical angels welcoming the listener into heaven or something, but it’s not exactly the best use of the biggest names in music. It could have been to prove a point that Murphy could get a lot done on his own, but when anyone tries to pack their album full of guest stars, they don’t normally get them all out of the way in one go before making the rest of the record.
