"Karma Chameleon" is a song by British New Wave band Culture Club, featured on the group's 1983 album Colour by Numbers. The song spent three weeks at #1 on the US Billboard Hot 100 starting on 4 February 1984, becoming the group's biggest hit and only US #1 among their many top ten hits. "Karma Chameleon" was also a huge global hit, hitting #1 in sixteen countries worldwide, and the top ten in several more. Sleeve by the photographer David Levine.
In the group's home country of the United Kingdom, it became the second Culture Club single to reach the top of the UK Singles Chart (after "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me"), where it stayed for six weeks in September and October 1983, and became the UK's biggest-selling single of the year 1983. Worldwide, "Karma Chameleon" went on to sell over 5 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling singles of all time. It is widely regarded as Culture Club's signature song.
In an interview, Culture Club frontman Boy George explained: "The song is about the terrible fear of alienation that people have, the fear of standing up for one thing. It's about trying to suck up to everybody. Basically, if you aren't true, if you don't act like you feel, then you get Karma-justice, that's nature's way of paying you back."
The song won Best British Single at the 1984 Brit Awards. The group performed the song as a finale when they appeared in the 1986 episode "Cowboy George" of The A-Team.
Read more about Karma Chameleon: Music Video, Cover Versions and Other Uses, Trivia
Famous quotes containing the word chameleon:
“... ideals, standards, aspirations,—those are chameleon words, and take color from their speakers,—often false tints. A scholarly man of my acquaintance once told me that he traveled a thousand miles into the desert to get away from the word uplift, and it was the first word he heard after he reached his destination.”
—Carolyn Wells (1862–1942)