Lipps Inc. – Funkytown

The Wedding DJ Who Invented Funkytown From His Minneapolis Bedroom — And Never Actually Left

Steven Greenberg was a wedding DJ who was fed up with Minnesota. “Funkytown” — released as a single by his project Lipps, Inc. in March 1980 — was his love letter to a city he desperately wanted to live in: New York. He wrote the track in 1979 because he was “bored to death with Minneapolis winters and wanted to move to New York City.” The line “gotta make a move to a town that’s right for me” was not a poetic metaphor. It was apartment-hunting frustration set to a synthesizer. He never did move. He didn’t need to.

In the United States, “Funkytown” entered the Billboard Hot 100 on March 29, 1980, and spent four weeks at number one from May 31 to June 21. It also topped the Disco Top 60 chart for four non-consecutive weeks. It devoured the international charts too, selling over 20 million copies in over 40 countries worldwide. When Greenberg heard it had sold 23,000 copies in New York in a single day, he genuinely didn’t know if that was good. His Casablanca Records rep burst out laughing.

Greenberg had been signed to Casablanca Records on the strength of an earlier song called “Rock It” — no one at the label had even heard “Funkytown” yet. He’d cold-called Cynthia Johnson after a mutual friend’s recommendation, asking her — a stranger — to sing his demo. Johnson was a 24-year-old police department secretary moonlighting with a local band called Flyte Tyme. That band would later evolve into The Time, Prince’s red-hot Minneapolis funk outfit. Cynthia Johnson was, briefly, one degree from two of the biggest musical forces of the decade.

On the recording, Greenberg played drums, bass, guitar, piano, synthesizers, and percussion — all at once, through multi-track recording, effectively dividing himself into a full band. The robotic “talk-talk-talk” vocal hook was run through a vocoder, giving the track a spectral, synthetic urgency that sounded unlike anything on American radio. Musically, it sat between disco and new wave, serving as a bridge as the tides of popular music shifted — also helping to anticipate the synth-driven pop explosion of the 1980s. Greenberg idolised Kraftwerk. You can hear it.

The group’s name was a pun — Lipps Inc. is a homophone of “lip sync.” Greenberg had intended to call it Lip Sync, but the name was already taken. Despite releasing four albums, “Funkytown” remained their sole defining moment — their only US Top 40 entry. Casablanca, already home to Kiss and Donna Summer, was on the verge of financial collapse when the single hit. It may have briefly kept the lights on.

In 1986, Australian new wave group Pseudo Echo released a rock-driven cover that reached number one in Australia and New Zealand and became a top ten hit in the US, UK, and Canada. Selena recorded a Spanish-language version. The Alvin and the Chipmunks take returned it to the Hot 100 in 2008. Its scene-stealing appearance in Shrek 2 in 2004 introduced it to an entirely new generation who had no idea it was 24 years old.

Greenberg went on to become VP of A&R at Mercury Records, where he signed Hanson, then founded S-Curve Records and discovered the Baha Men and Joss Stone. He later spent years in a legal battle to reclaim the master recording from Universal Music Group. “After 35 years,” he said, “I think that it’s fair that I could get my master recording back.” A man who wrote a song about escaping his hometown spent the next four decades fighting for what he built there. Funkytown was Minneapolis all along.