Give It Up

Harry Wayne Casey, frontman of KC & The Sunshine Band, wrote this song with the singer Deborah Carter, who provides backup vocals. In the song, Casey sings: Everybody wants you Everybody wants your love I would just like to make you mine all mine In a Songfacts interview, he explained: "It seemed like everybody I always wanted to be with already had somebody else or wanted to be with somebody else. And I noticed how there's always this one person, everybody wants them, and they don't want anybody, and it would be real nice if you were mine. But you can't have them. That sort of situation. And then there's the ones that are just so hard to get, that play all the games. So it's, 'Give it up, baby, give it up.' Everybody looks and stares at this person, but they're always like too good to give it up to anybody. They're always just playing this little game."

KC & The Sunshine Band were one of the most popular acts of the disco era, with five #1 hits from 1975-1979. But in the '80s, when disco suddenly became decidedly uncool, it seemed like their hit-making days were over. In 1981, Harry Wayne Casey left TK Records and took his act to Epic. Their first album on the label, The Painter, was released that year and flopped. On January 15, 1982, Casey was badly injured in a car accident seven blocks from his Florida home. The group's next album, All In A Night's Work was released that summer, but Epic's American unit showed little enthusiasm for it, especially since Casey couldn't actively promote. The UK division of Epic, though, liked the song "Give It Up" and decided to push it as a single. It was a good call: The song went to #1 in the UK in August 1983, giving KC & The Sunshine Band their only British chart-topper. (The group hit the UK chart before they got on the pop charts in America, with "Queen Of Clubs" reaching #7 in 1974.) Epic in the US still weren't interested, so Casey released the track on his own label, Meca, credited to just KC. One by one, radio stations took notice and added it to their playlists. When it became clear there was no lasting disco stigma, most pop stations came on board, and listener response was huge. The song peaked at #18 in March 1984, but the song was far more popular than that chart position indicates because it was added to playlists gradually instead of all at once. It also aged well: on Spotify, it is the most popular KC & The Sunshine Band song, with well over 100 million streams.

KC & The Sunshine Band's songs, including their five #1 hits in the United States, were written by Harry Casey with their bass player, Rick Finch. When Casey signed with Epic Records in 1981, Finch left the group, but he returned to work on this song. In a Songfacts interview with Finch, he explained: "They said, 'Please come back and just help us with one more song.' And so I did. But then I left again with a bad taste in my mouth, and so did they. We had some really ugly words to one another. That was the beginning of the end. And now there's this extreme hatred that exists from their end. It shouldn't go like that. I've tried over the years to be in touch with Harry but he has a lot of people who seem to be more interested in keeping us apart rather than for us to resolve any past differences. I know what their reasons are and like everything else in life it seems to always boil down to money. It's worth more to them to keep us apart than to allow for things to get patched up. We did a lot of great work as a team – created music that has stood the test of time, music that will outlive both of us. Life's too short for the B.S." Explaining his contribution to the song, Finch said, "The bass line, and the smoothness of the song arrangement. After that, nothing."