Sly Stone, at one time the San Francisco Bay Area's top rated rhythm and blues disc jockey and also a former A&R man for a now defunct local label (Autumn), once composed a song, with Tom Donahue, called "The Swim." Sly Stone is well-based in composition and production and he does have "a whole new thing."

The record represents the Bay Area's very first rhythm and blues group to go national. It reflects a combination of San Francisco's 'new thing' and some standard R&B techniques, an approach which is interesting but not entirely effective. None of the tracks particularly stand out as strong. The production — and it is more a production than a performance — is still in the experimentation stage and has not yet come to a satisfactory conclusion.

“Karma Chameleon”

Boy George has said this song was about standing by what you believe in. However, at the time, he was involved in a secret affair with Culture Club drummer Jon Moss. "Now people can understand the songs better," he said. "They were written about my relationship with Jon, and they were also written about being a gay man in a homophobic world." The lines "If I listen to your lies, would you say/I'm a man without conviction/I'm a man who doesn't know how to sell a contradiction," described his life at the time, he said. "I was selling this big lie."