Oh Sheila sounds alot like Extra loveable to me, even though EL was never really released, except through the underground.

tricky2 said:

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

Sheila E(scovedo) is not the only person in the world named Sheila!!!!! Could they have been talking about someone else? It's possible.

mayebelle81 said:

Sure...I've known 4 girls in my life named Sheila. Two of who were girlfriends of mine. And one of them was way before this song ever came out.So it's more than possible that Melvin and the gang knew a girl named Sheila. Nobody up in here said this song was about Sheila E.

mayebelle81 said:

WHAT?!!!!

blackguitaristz said:

I thought it was but only because I thought Prince wrote it. Because if P did write it, you know that shit would have been about Sheila E. Had I known from the start that someone else wrote it I would have never assumed it was about her. I still would have thought about her every time I heard it though.

That has had me smiling all day!

Didn't Prince rip off James Brown and Funkadelic, what's the difference?

Well, now, let's see...RFTW and Prince are both black...and, upon further inspection, both wrote and performed lots of songs about fucking...yes, I'd say the evidence is overwhelming, RFTW ripped off Prince.

JuliePurplehead said:

A lot of folks back in 84 thought P wrote it. And like I mentioned earlier, many thought it was about Sheila E. The word was Sheila herself thought that not only did P write the song, but that he wrote it about her. P was like "Nah baby....not the kid."

blackguitaristz said:

I thought that was a Prince track too. Actually I thought the main singer, although he's darker-complected, resembled Prince a lot. Seems like everyone was emualating Prince and his band back in those days. I still love that song.

Digital Display is hotter than many Prince tracks!

lilgish said:

True!! I actually really dig that album.

missfee said:

No. The intro of the song has "fake ass" Australian accents.
In Australia, the slang word for woman or someone's girlfriend is a "sheila", hence the song title. The song is about a "sheila", possibly including but not limited to Miss Escovedo.

BlaqueKnight said:

Hey I didn't know that. Makes sense now.

BlaqueKnight said:

lilgish said:

I liked this song much more than "Oh Sheila"

Well, to clear up any dispute, Ready For The World's "Oh, Sheila" was about Sheila E. RFTW lead singer Melvin Riley (co-writer of the song) said in TV interviews during the song's rise in 1985 he had a crush on the drummer and she was the inspiration for the song (hence, some of the Prince-related confusion).

And yes, the song was a big hit, going No. 1 on the Billboard R&B Singles and Hot 100 charts in early fall 1985.

RFTW was lot like a lot of acts during that period (including Dreamboy), inspired by the Minneapolis Sound (and likely more by the more straightforward soul style by The Time than Prince). The only people I hear actually confusing "Oh, Sheila" as being a Prince-written song or RFTW being a Prince spinoff are either people tangentially familiar with the Minneapolis Sound or people who were not around when the song was released.
[Edited 5/19/08 13:50pm]

I never picked up on the Lady Cab driver similairty until someone pointed it out.... it's jus that the chorus cadence of the words is similar. The rest of the songs is nothing like LCD.

In terms of "ripping off prince", they not only used the LInn, they used similar detuning effect of the sidestick that was one of Prince's signature things back then (like in let's go crazy, beautiful ones etc.)

If anything, the synthesizer riff in "Oh, Sheila" sounds similar to Cameo's "Style." The most obvious Prince-sounding element is the industrial-sounding drums, a la songs like "Let's Go Crazy" and "Automatic." But by 1985, Prince had abandoned those elements in his music and they were more used by the likes of Ready For The World and Jesse Johnson.

LittleAmy said:

Exactly!! When I first heard "Oh Sheila",I knew that the synth riff was very similiar to Cameo's 1983 song "Style" which,ironically,is a rip-off of their own hit "Be Yourself",lol.




Yeah,it's the drums that sounded so much like Prince.RFTW's drum programming was heavily inspired by Prince's 1982/83/84 work.Have you ever heard "I'm The One Who Loves You"? The last track on RFTW's first album? That sounds the most like a Prince production,imo.It even has that "squishy" synth sound that Prince uses on Apollonia 6's "Sex Shooter".

ButterscotchPimp said:

"Don't Go" is one of my favorite songs EVER.

Force MDs Tender Love is a Prince song, right?

RodeoSchro said:

I think this makes you the funkiest white man, Greg.

Stymie said:

LOL, you might not think that after you hear me sing "Don't Go". I might get bumped down a few thousand notches.

"Check out what I said, I said Baby I'm sorry for doing those things that I diiiiiddddd, ooooh oooh oooh EWWWWW, OOOOO, ewwwww!"

horatio said:

longin' for some of yo
ho-rat-i-o

Cinnie said:

blackguitaristz said:

i read someone thought the song was about sheila, but it's not that serious i was joking
[Edited 5/19/08 12:45pm]

JuliePurplehead said:

you got the joke?

BlaqueKnight said:

Fair dinkum cobber, theres nothing orstrailian about their accents, its not British its just fudge packer accents if you get what I mean.
I live in New Zealand, so I know what an Australian sounds like, and they do not sound like Melvin Riley junior