>somebody's watching me
>sir, its day shift
>Carry on!
How ‘Somebody’s Watching Me’ Singer Rockwell Created a Paranoid Pop Classic
Son of music royalty talks shunning nepotism, calling on God and enlisting Michael Jackson for 1984hit
December 7, 2016
Berry Gordy was in his Los Angeles mansion in 1982 when his son, 18-year-old Kennedy William Gordy, brought the Motown Records founder a pop-funk demo he had created on a tiny 4-track recorder in his one-bedroom Hollywood apartment. Gordy, of course, had hundreds of Number One songs to his name – either as producer, songwriter or label head – so he knew a hit when he heard one. But after listening to his son’s demo, his reaction was less than exuberant.
“He said something like, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s alright. That’s OK,'” Kennedy Gordy tells Rolling Stone. “‘Don’t give up your day job, young man. Keep writing and you’ll come up with something one day.’ I was devastated.”
One year later, Kennedy Gordy would take on the name Rockwell, enlist Michael Jackson and his brother Jermaine for background vocals and turn the song, now titled “Somebody’s Watching Me,” into an international and enduring smash hit that, more than 30 years later, remains the perennial paranoia-rock anthem and Halloween mix go-to song.
Becoming a songwriter when you’re the son of one of the music industry’s most influential record execs is both an audacious endeavor and, ostensibly, the easiest thing in the world. But when he submitted his demo to Motown Records, the then-unknown musician took a different route, opting against using his real name to avoid charges of nepotism.
“When he found out I was signed to Motown, he called me up one day and said, ‘How did you get signed? How does that happen? What happened?'” Rockwell recalls. “I said, ‘I don’t know. I guess they liked my music.’ He seemed like he was upset about it. I still, to this day, don’t know what his reservations were for me to be signed.”
Looking back on it now, Rockwell says he never considered using the Gordy name despite the doors it would open. “I never thought of it that way,” he says. “But I wanted it to be a family affair because Motown has always been a family. My father tried to teach us the love that the artists even had amongst themselves and his interactions with them. He was so busy with them that a lot of times he was not available for us as kids.”
Rockwell had written tracks before, but they were, as he put it, “mediocre at best.” He was frustrated. Angry. He dropped to his knees and decided, on a whim, to pray. “I asked God to give me it,” he says. “The prayer was, ‘God grant me the creativity to write a song that’ll go to the top of the charts and tickle the taste buds of the music connoisseur.’ Everything came to me so easily after that prayer.” Over the next two days, Rockwell sat down on his bedroom floor and began writing “Somebody’s Watching Me,” with most of the studio version recorded during the first take.
Inspiration came from both the past and the present. He’d think back to his days as a kid looking out of his bedroom window and “seeing his neighbor sticking his head out the window trying to look up in our apartment.” While writing the song, he lived with a girl who was the recipient of many pranks. “When she would take a shower, I would go up to the glass, wait until she was washing her hair and then press my face against the glass,” he says. “She would open her eyes, see my face and go, ‘Ahhhh!!!!'” (The prank inspired the lyrics “When I’m in the shower/I’m afraid to wash my hair/’Cause I might open my eyes/And find someone standing there.”)
Enlisting Jackson to sing the hook sounds like classic label maneuvering; a way to help out the unknown artist with a heavyweight co-sign. But the truth is more organic: Jackson was six years older than Rockwell, with the latter often spending his childhood days at the Jacksons’ home. The fledgling songwriter went to the Jackson residence to show the family what he’d been recording. After bringing in a boombox with a demo cassette of the song, the nervous singer performed over the music.