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Irene Cara - Fame

Irene Cara - Fame Lyrics and Youtube Music Videos

Album: Fame (Original Soundtrack)
Released: 1980

Fame Lyrics

I'm gonna live forever
I'm gonna learn how to fly
I'm gonna make it to heaven
Baby, remember my name!

Baby, look at me
And tell me what you see
You ain't seen the best of me yet.
Give me time,
I'll make you forget the rest.
I got more in me,
And you can set it free
I can catch the moon in my hand
Don't you know who I am?

Remember my name. Fame!
I'm gonna live forever
I'm gonna learn how to fly--high!

I feel it comin' together
People will see me and cry. Fame!
I'm gonna make it to heaven
Light up the sky like a flame. Fame!
I'm gonna live forever
Baby, remember my name
Remember, remember, remember, remember,
Remember, remember, remember, remember.

Baby, hold me tight
Cause you can make it right.
You can shoot me straight to the top
Give me love and take all I got to give

Baby, I'll be tough
Too much is not enough, no
I can ride your heart 'till it breaks.
Ooh, I got what it takes.

Writer/s: DEAN PITCHFORD, MICHAEL GORE
Publisher: Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC
Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

Fame

Fame was a 1980 movie about students at Fiorello LaGuardia High, also known as the New York City High School for the Performing Arts. It's a real school whose alumni include Robert De Niro, Jennifer Aniston, Liza Minnelli and Nicki Minaj. The movie was fictional, following some of the students who aspired to stardom. Irene Cara played the role of Coco Hernandez in the film and also sang this title song. The song captured the spirit of the students determined to make sure people remember their names.

Lesley Gore's brother Michael Gore was the musical supervisor on Fame and responsible for coming up with the songs for the movie. He wrote this song with Dean Pitchford, a stage and commercial actor with a degree in English literature from Yale. Pitchford studied songwriting with Peter Allen ("I Honestly Love You," "Don't Cry Out Loud") and Gore gave him a big break when he asked him to write some lyrics for the movie. Pitchford co-wrote the title song and also "I Sing the Body Electric" and "Red Light," which were included in the film. When we spoke with Pitchford in 2012 , he told us: "At the time it was exactly what I had been living for the last six or seven years in New York. Had I stopped that and gotten further away from it in years, perhaps it wouldn't have been as heartfelt as it was. But both 'Fame' and 'The Body Electric' were both real available to me.

Gore and Pitchford later collaborated on "All The Man I Need," which was a hit for Whitney Houston in 1990. Soon after Fame Pitchford started work on his screenplay that would become Footloose.

Dean Pitchford tells us that this song took about a month to write. "That was excruciating, because it was very tough to navigate," He said. "You know, the idea of fame is such a pumped up, almost self-congratulatory notion, like, I'm going to be famous. It was very tricky to navigate and write something that still had energy and gosh-golly about it, without feeling too self-satisfied."

This won the 1980 Oscar for Best Original Song, and Michael Gore also won for Best Score for his work on the movie. Three years later, Irene Cara won the Best Original Song award along with Giorgio Moroder and Keith Forsey for writing "Flashdance... What a Feeling," which she also performed.

A very distinctive feature of this song are the background vocals that trail out the word "Remember" after the line "baby, remember my name." It was Luther Vandross who came up with that part and sang it with backup singers Vivian Cherry and Vicki Sue Robinson (best known for her hit "Turn The Beat Around"). Vandross was not yet a solo star, but was in demand as a backup vocalist. He was the contractor on this session, meaning he was in charge of the backup vocals. Dean Pitchford explained: "He came in, listened down to the track. We got to the end of the chorus and he said, 'Back it up, back it up! Check this out.' And Irene Cara sang, 'Baby remember my name,' and he went, 'Remember, remember, remember...' and we all went, 'Oh! That's terrific!' Luther Vandross is the one who not only came up with 'remember, remember, remember...' but he also stacked the voices on top of, 'I'm going to learn how to fly high.' He did that. He made a couple of other contributions around the edges, but the 'remember' was the major one."

The movie was spun off into a TV show in 1982, with this song used at the theme and sung by Erica Gimpel, who played Coco Hernandez in this version (Janet Jackson was on the show for a season). When the song was first released in 1980, it flopped in the UK, but two years later it hit #1 as a result of the TV series.

The line "I'm gonna live forever" is one Dean Pitchford knew very well when he started writing this song. Says Dean, "There was a play that had been on Broadway years ago called Dylan, and it won massive amounts of awards when it was on Broadway. It was about the life of the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas. When I was in high school I competed in speech tournaments and I was a debater, but I also did dramatic interp and things like that. There was a particular long speech that Dylan Thomas gives. He's drunk and he speaks about the gift that a poet gets: he may not have a long life, but in his poems he gets to live forever. And I competed with this, I went all the way to the state finals delivering this speech. And I always loved the sentiment in poetry: if you write words, you get to live forever in your works.

I wrote that line when Michael Gore played me the melody that he had come up with for the chorus. I listened down to it once, and I said, 'Oh, you mean something like...' and he went back to the top and he was playing it down, and I sang, 'Fame! I'm gonna live forever,' and he stopped playing, and he went, 'Oh my god! Write that down! I don't want to forget that!' And I said, 'Oh, Michael, I don't think I could forget that one.' The rest of the song took forever to write. It was literally a month of six days, seven days a week, six hours a day of carving every one of those verses. But that line sprang out of my mouth."

Lyricists can be very particular about how their words are sung, lest the be misinterpreted. He was new at this, so Dean Pitchford didn't push it, but in later years he became more a of "lyric policeman," even asking Barbra Streisand to redo a line in his song "If I Never Met You." Said Pitchford: "When I did 'Fame,' it never occurred to me that anybody would mishear Irene Cara sing, 'People will see me and cry, Fame!', but people have misheard that as 'die.' And I was horrified to find that lyric sites would write out the lyric to 'Fame' and state as if it were fact that I had written 'people will see me and die.' No. I had written 'people will see me and cry, Fame!' That would be their cry."

The movie Fame got a remake in 2009, with Naturi Naughton in a starring role and performing this song. Her version made #33 in the UK.

David Bowie - Fame

David Bowie - Fame Youtube Music Videos and Lyrics

Album: Young Americans
Released: 1975

Fame Lyrics

Fame makes a man take things over
Fame lets him loose, hard to swallow
Fame puts you there where things are hollow (fame)
Fame, it's not your brain, it's just the flame
That burns your change to keep you insane (fame)

Fame, (fame) what you like is in the limo
Fame, (fame) what you get is no tomorrow
Fame, (fame) what you need you have to borrow Fame
Fame, (fame) it's mine, it's mine, it's just his line
To bind your time, it drives you to crime (fame)

Is it any wonder I reject you first?
Fame, fame, fame, fame
Is it any wonder you are too cool to fool? (fame)
Fame, bully for you, chilly for me
Got to get a rain check on pain (fame)

Fame
Fame, fame, fame
Fame, fame, fame
Fame, fame, fame, fame
Fame, fame, fame, fame
Fame, fame, fame
Fame, what's your name?
Fame

Writer/s: LENNON, JOHN/BOWIE, DAVID/ALOMAR, CARLOS
Publisher: Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Universal Music Publishing Group, BMG RIGHTS MANAGEMENT US, LLC, TINTORETTO MUSIC, UNIDISC MUSIC, SONY ATV MUSIC PUB LLC
Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

Fame Song Chart

This song is about what it is like to be famous. Bowie gave his thoughts on the subject in a 2003 interview with Performing Songwriter magazine: "Fame itself, of course, doesn't really afford you anything more than a good seat in a restaurant. That must be pretty well known by now. I'm just amazed how fame is being posited as the be all and end all, and how many of these young kids who are being foisted on the public have been talked into this idea that anything necessary to be famous is all right. It's a sad state of affairs. However arrogant and ambitious I think we were in my generation, I think the idea was that if you do something really good, you'll become famous. The emphasis on fame itself is something new. Now it's, to be famous you should do what it takes, which is not the same thing at all. And it will leave many of them with this empty feeling. Then again, I don't know if it will, because I think a lot of them are genuinely quite satisfied. I know a couple of personalities over in England who are famous for being famous, basically. They sort of initially came out of the pop world, but they're quite happy being photographed going everywhere and showing their kids off and this is a career to them. A career of like being there and turning up and saying, 'Yes it's me, the famous girl or guy' (laughs). It's like, 'What do you want?' It's so Warhol. It's as vacuous as that. And that to me, is a big worry. I think it's done dreadful things to the music industry. There's such a lot of rubbish, drivel out there."

John Lennon helped write this song - he came up with the title and also sang the background "Fame" parts in the high voice. They started working on the song when Bowie invited Lennon to the studio, and Lennon played rhythm guitar on a jam session that resulted in this track. Bowie met Lennon less than a year earlier at a party thrown by Elizabeth Taylor. Lennon was one of Bowie's idols, and they became good friends.

Bowie often had conversations with Lennon about how fame took away parts of their lives. In the same interview, Bowie said: "We'd been talking about management, and it kind of came out of that. He was telling me, 'You're being shafted by your present manager' (laughs). That was basically the line. And John was the guy who opened me up to the idea that all management is crap. That there's no such thing as good management in rock 'n' roll, and you should try to do it without it. It was at John's instigation that I really did without managers, and started getting people in to do specific jobs for me, rather than signing myself away to one guy forever and have him take a piece of everything that I earn. Usually, quite a large piece, and have him really not do very much. So, if I needed a certain publishing thing done, I'd bring in a person who specialized in that area, and they would, on a one-job basis, work for me and we'd reach the agreed fee. And I started to realize that if you're bright, you kind of know you're worth, and if you're creative, you know what you want to do and where you want to go in that way. What extra thing is this manager supposed to do for you? I suppose in the old days, it was [in a hokey New York voice] 'Get you breaks!' (laughs). I don't quite know what managers are supposed to do, even. I think if you have even just a modicum of intelligence, you're going to know what it is you are and where you want to go. Once you know that, you just bring in specific people for specialist jobs. You don't have to end up signing your life away to some fool who's just there kind of grabbing hold of the coattails."

Bowie's guitarist Carlos Alomar came up with the guitar riff. It was based on a song called "Foot Stompin'" by The Flares, which Bowie had been performing on tour. "In funk music, what you want to do is put down a lot of holes," Alomar recalled to Mojo magazine of the song's instrumentation, "leaving a little space for someone to be able to dance in. Lennon played acoustic guitar and we reversed it and that's the suction sound you hear at the beginning."

"Then we put up big reverb upon David's riff," he continued. "Like going to a recreation centre when it's empty, taking your amplifier and your guitar – and filling that room."

This was Bowie's first big hit in America, and also his first to do better in the US than the UK. He had a few UK hits before this, including "Rebel Rebel," "Life On Mars," and "Diamond Dogs."

Bowie: "Fame can take interesting men and thrust mediocrity upon them."

This was recorded at the Sigma Sound studios in Philadelphia, where many soul classics of the '70s were made. Bowie wanted the album to have a rhythm & blues feel, and he called the sound he created "Plastic Soul."

Bowie whispers something at the end. It is rumored to be either "Brings so much pain" or "Feeling so gay, feeling gay."

Bowie performed this on Soul Train. He is one of only a few white performers to appear on the show. Bowie allegedly got drunk before the performance to calm his nerves.

This was remixed as a Techno version for the Pretty Woman soundtrack. It was re-titled "Fame '90." This version was also included on the album Changesbowie when it was re-issued.

At the end of this song, "Fame" is repeated 23 times, each "Fame" being a different note. The repetitions of "Fame" span an amazing four octaves. (thanks, Annabelle - Eugene, OR)

In one of Bowie's first US TV appearances, he performed this on The Cher Show in 1975. (thanks, Bertrand - Paris, France)

At the time this song was written, Bowie was under contract with MainMan Records and Tony DeFries. Money was mismanaged after several tours, leaving Bowie broke from having to pay back expenses owed. Bowie wrote this song in response to the whole financial ordeal. Not too long after, Bowie fired DeFries at John Lennon's suggestion. (thanks, Thomas - Marion, IN)