LISTEN: Paul Parker’s 1982 gay anthem was right on target

Paul Parker is a contemporary of Hi-NRG music icon Patrick Cowley, and his musical stylings reflect as much. His first hit single, 1982’s “Right on Target,” was produced by Cowley and pulsates with the same electronic dance music beats that compelled many gays of the day to hit the dancefloor. But throughout Parker’s decades-spanning music career, he has been more than “right on target.” His music has been a harbinger of big, gay, Pride season fun. 

From coast to coast, “Right on Target” established Parker as a Cowley acolyte. Released on Megatone Records, the song was the first single off of Parker’s 1983 debut album, “Too Much to Dream” and stayed at #1 on the dance charts for two weeks. 

In true Hi-NRG style, the beats are the main attraction over the lyrics. But the song still delivers a story that is all too familiar in the club scene about attraction, connection, and being caught up in the music. 

“Tell me what’s your secret/How do you know, what you know/You can see right through me/Deep into my soul,” Parker delivers the lyrics. 

In another part of the song, he takes aim at love and destiny as Cupid: “Nothin’ stops emotion/In the hands of destiny/Aimin’ with precision/Let your arrow fly/Judgin’ all the angles/With an eagle’s eye.”

Parker followed up “Right on Target” with “Shot In the Night” in 1983, which seemed more musically arranged to show off his vocal abilities and put him on track to be a pop star. And though he confesses in the song that he’s “not looking for trouble, trouble finds me wherever I go,” his experimental musical catalog has proved that he has been good trouble for the development of EDM and pop music.

He released a dance floor-ready cover of Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” in 1985 and followed that with the single “One Look (One Look Was Enough)” in 1987. Parker’s dance covers continued throughout the ’90s until he regrouped and began to blend the best of his past catalog with the futuristic Millenium aesthetic with a string of new releases in the early aughts.

Under the San Francisco-based label UTMOSIS, he released the digital single “Just Hold On To Love” in 2007, “Don’t Stop (What You’re Doin’ To Me)” in 2008 and “Chargin’ Me Up” in 2009. In a right-on-target pop moment, he also recorded a duet called “Perfect Target” with synthpop band Ganymede in 2008 and appears on the band’s LP “Operation Ganymede.”

In 2010, Parker released his first full-length album of original material in over a decade titled “Take It From Me” under the UTMOSIS label. Well into middle age at this point in his music career, he hadn’t lost his EDM rhythm, releasing the EP “Superman” in 2013. The song, done in Cowley’s classic Hi-NRG style, was done as a collaboration with producer Harlem Nights.

Although Cowley did not live to see Parker’s success, passing away from AIDS complications in 1982, Parker has been clear about the impact his collaboration with Cowley has had on the trajectory of his career. From performing live in clubs across the world to his signature ultra-masculine presenting energy in photos and on album covers, he has garnered a loyal crop of international fans who have come to expect his signature gay-tinged sex appeal in music.

He fondly recounts the high points of his career in the memories section of his website at paulparkermusic.com. And it makes for a good read for those interested in what it was like during the height of ’80s dance music. 

“This was my first appearance outside of the state of California, ‘Right On Target’ had just hit the dance charts,” Parker recounts next to one photo where he looks young and sultry. “I did a three city tour, this was a Loading Zone party in Chicago, I then went to Texas to the Loading Zone there, and then New Orleans and played a third club — three clubs over two weekends.” 

Give “Right on Target” a play this Pride season in celebration of the good times and those who would surely love to be still dancing today.