By 1985, Rick James was coming off one of the most productive runs in Black music — and he walked into his personal studio in Buffalo and made one of the most polished albums of his career. Rolling Stone called it a waste. They were wrong.

The title track hit the Top 5 on R&B, hit number one on Dance Club Songs, featured Smokey Robinson in the video, and Rick performed it live on The A-Team. The album never crossed over the way Street Songs did — but it never got a fair shot. It didn't even get a proper US CD release for decades.

Throwin' Down dropped in 1982 — one year after Street Songs sold nearly four million copies worldwide. That's an impossible follow-up slot. Dance Wit' Me hit number 3 on R&B and featured legendary jazz-funk vibraphonist Roy Ayers across seven full minutes of pure groove.

Most people have never sat with this track because the shadow of Street Songs was too long. The album went gold, hit number 13 on the Billboard 200, spent 10 weeks at number 2 on the R&B albums chart. Super Freak just owned the whole conversation.

Hard to Get is what happens when Rick James writes a spiritual successor to Super Freak and nobody notices because the original is too legendary to compete with. The same DNA is in there — that riff, that bounce, those absurd backing vocals — but it stands on its own.

It hit number 15 on R&B. For most artists that's a career moment. For Rick James in 1982, sandwiched between Super Freak and his Temptations collab on the same record, it practically disappeared. Rick's own estate called it the "get-up-and-boogie feel-good track." Hidden in plain sight for 40 years.