Culture Club – ‘Karma Chameleon’

1 October 1983

In the 1983 case of Your Parents v. Pop Music, exhibit A for the prosecution is ‘Karma Chameleon’: what does it mean, and does he have to keep repeating it? On a related point, while it’s fine for a rhotic English speaker to glide quickly over “kaw-ma”, those of us in Ireland and North America find “karma chameleon” quite a clunky phrase. Or maybe it’s just me.

Enough about the title; my main issue is that I really want to like this song more. That chorus is patently catchy, the harmonica splashes a bit of colour (if not the full red, gold and green), and some of Boy George’s non-title lyrics here are quite good: “I’m a man without conviction / I’m a man who doesn’t know / How to sell a contradiction” intrigues me.

However, on the debit side, the rest of the track sounds flat and studio-bound, George doesn’t get to flex his soulful voice as he did in ‘Do You Really Want To Hurt Me’, and anyone who calls a song ‘Karma Chameleon’ is probably just rhyming “conviction” and “contradiction” from convenience rather than any sophisticated lyricism.

It’s still better than ‘Karma Police’ and ‘Instant Karma’, though.