"I Want to Be Your Man" is a song by American funk singer-songwriter Roger Troutman, from his third studio album Unlimited!. It was released as the lead single from the album in September 1987 by Reprise Records. The song was co-written by Roger's brother, Larry Troutman, and produced by Roger, who conceived of the song as a statement on romantic commitment. "I Want to Be Your Man" features Roger singing in both his natural tenor and his trademark talk box.
Roger Troutman developed "I Want to Be Your Man" around the theme of romantic commitment. "Guys have trouble committing and women want us to commit," he explained to authors Adam White and Fred Bronson. "Women want us to admit that we don't want to commit."[3] Troutman took the idea and began working on a track similar in style to "Computer Love," a 1986 hit for his band Zapp. "I was playing in Dallas and [Troutman's brother Larry] flew out. We sat in the hotel room one day and wrote the song. I talked to him about what I was trying to say and one thing led to another. We came back and recorded a vocal."[4]
"I Want to Be Your Man" is a ballad featuring Roger's vocals filtered through a vocoder. According to Roger, he had never mixed his "human" voice with the talk box before, and recording the vocals was tedious because he could only play one note at a time on the vocoder.[4] To layer six-part harmonies, he spoke the lyric while playing a melody line then rewound the tape and repeated the process for the harmonizing part while playing together with the previously recorded one.[2] After he finished layering tracks, if he didn't like the result he had to scrap everything and start over.[4] Larry Troutman recommended Nicole Cottom, a friend of his daughter, to help sing background vocals. Roger recalled her being in the studio one day while he was recording his vocals: "There was a spot in the song where there was a hole and I asked her to do something. It was so good, there was no need to take it out."[4]
Release and chart performance
Roger disliked "I Want to Be Your Man" when it was completed and thought it served as album filler, at best.[2][4] However, executives at his label, Warner Brothers, loved the song. Label president Lenny Waronker and chairman Mo Ostin wanted to relaunch Warner's sister label Reprise Records, which had been dormant for several years, and they told Roger that "I Want to Be Your Man" would be a "perfect opening act" to bring the label back. At first, Roger was hesitant because of his familiarity with the Warner Bros. personnel, but he agreed to the move once he learned he would be working with the same R&B promotion department.[4]
"I Want to Be Your Man" was added to US urban contemporary radio playlists in September 1987; a commercial single was released the following month.[5][6] Initially, the song received heavy airplay on radio stations in California, particularly Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay Area, and in Southern states.[7][8] It climbed to number one on the BillboardHot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart for the week ending December 19, 1987.[9] "I Want to Be Your Man" crossed over to pop radio and peaked at number three on the Hot 100 singles chart issue dated February 13, 1988.[10] With the song's mainstream commercial success, Roger said, "I feel I've reached a milestone—yet the record still has flair and the ingredients that will allow black radio to take it to number one and make it a hit first."[11] "I Want to Be Your Man" reached the top 10 in the Netherlands and Belgium, and the top 40 in Germany, New Zealand, and Canada.[12][13] It peaked at number 61 on the UK Singles Chart in October 1987.[14]
Critical reception
A review of "I Want to Be Your Man" in the September 26, 1987, issue of Billboard called the single "a sultry ballad" and noted the similarity of Roger's "trademark" vocal style to that used in Zapp's recordings.[15] In a 1987 review of Roger's Unlimited! album, Connie Johnson of the Los Angeles Times said of the song: "It's hard to resist" when Troutman sings through the voice box "with languid, shy-guy sincerity".[16] Music critic Bruce Pollock listed the song in his 2005 book Rock Song Index: The 7500 Most Important Songs for the Rock and Roll Era.[17]
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White, Adam; Bronson, Fred (1993). The Billboard Book of Number One Rhythm & Blues Hits (1st ed.). New York: Billboard Books. p. 404. ISBN978-0823082858.
^"R&R National Airplay: Urban Contemporary". Radio & Records. 1 (705): 76. September 25, 1987.
^Pollock, Bruce (2005). Rock Song Index: The 7500 Most Important Songs for the Rock and Roll Era (second ed.). Routledge. pp. 167–8. ISBN978-0415970730.
