Two Tons O’ Fun – Get the Feeling: The Complete Fantasy/Honey Recordings
Real Gone Music / Second Disc Records, 2024, 2xCD
The name arrives before the voices.
Two Tons O’ Fun.
It is funny, excessive, direct, and impossible to overlook. It announces size without apology and pleasure without moderation. Before Martha Wash and Izora Rhodes Armstead sing a note, they have already refused one of the oldest demands placed upon women, especially women in entertainment:
Become smaller.
Take up less room.
Speak more softly.
Let the eye approve of you before the ear is permitted to listen.
Two Tons O’ Fun reverses the measurement.
The phrase does not ask whether these women are too large for the stage. It suggests the stage may be too small for what is approaching.
Then the voices arrive, and the name begins sounding conservative.
Martha Wash possesses a soprano capable of lifting a dance record by its roof. Izora Armstead answers with a deeper, rougher authority, a voice with gravel beneath the gospel. Together they do not blend by becoming indistinguishable. Their power comes from contrast.
One rises.
One grounds.
One flashes.
One burns.
Both can thunder.
Get the Feeling: The Complete Fantasy/Honey Recordings collects the two albums they made in 1980, first as Two Tons O’ Fun and then as the Two Tons, along with alternate versions, single edits, extended mixes, and later dance-floor reconstructions.
The collection allows listeners to hear a transition that popular history has often compressed into a footnote. Martha and Izora are commonly remembered as Sylvester’s extraordinary singers or as the future Weather Girls who would record “It’s Raining Men.”
Both descriptions are true.
Neither is sufficient.
These records capture the period when the women standing behind a star stepped forward and discovered that the foreground had been waiting for them.
“Do You Wanna Boogie, Hunh?” begins with a question that is not really a question.
The “hunh?” at the end removes any trace of politeness. It is playful, challenging, and physical. The song does not offer dance as an abstract possibility. It tests whether the listener is willing to enter.
Disco depended upon this kind of invitation.
The rhythm opens a door, but the body must answer.
Martha and Izora do not sound like distant icons instructing a crowd from above. They sound present inside the gathering, shouting encouragement while generating the force to which everyone else responds.
Their voices retain church even when the subject is dancing.
This is not accidental. Gospel and disco share more architecture than hostile histories sometimes acknowledge. Both depend upon repetition, escalation, testimony, collective response, and the transformation of individual feeling into communal release.
A preacher asks whether the congregation can feel it.
A disco singer asks whether the dancers can feel it.
The room answers with bodies.
“I Got the Feeling” makes the connection explicit. The song’s title is nearly a complete gospel sentence. It does not specify the feeling because specification would reduce it.
The important fact is possession.
I got it.
It has entered me.
Something is happening that thought alone cannot contain.
Izora’s lead gives the song magnificent heft. She does not hover over the groove. She enters it bodily, driving each phrase into the rhythm until feeling becomes a kind of public evidence.
The voice says: believe me because I am producing the proof in front of you.
This music repeatedly returns to the legitimacy of sensation. “Get the feeling” is both instruction and philosophy. The body is not treated as an embarrassing vehicle carrying a superior mind. The body recognizes truths through rhythm, attraction, fatigue, pleasure, breath, heat, and movement.
Disco knew this.
Women of size often know it under harsher conditions because society makes their bodies public property for commentary. People inspect, advise, diagnose, ridicule, fetishize, and judge while pretending such behavior is neutral.
Naming themselves Two Tons O’ Fun interrupts that inspection.
The name acknowledges the gaze before the gaze can pretend innocence.
Yes, we are large.
Now listen to what large can do.
There is risk in such reclamation. A person may take possession of a word and still be wounded by the world that made possession necessary. Humor does not prove the absence of pain. Boldness is not evidence that cruelty has failed to land.
But self-naming changes the direction of power.
The joke is no longer whispered about them outside the room.
They put it above the entrance and sell tickets beneath it.
“Just Us” offers another form of reclamation.
The title contracts the world to a chosen pair. Outside judgments, expectations, and hierarchies briefly lose jurisdiction. There is only us.
Yet in the context of Martha and Izora, “just us” also sounds like an artistic declaration. No famous male lead is required to make the voices meaningful. No one needs to explain them as supporting architecture.
Just us.
Enough.
The song’s disco mixes extend that claim. Repetition gives the phrase time to detach from ordinary language and become an environment. On the dance floor, identity can move from statement into sensation.
The listener no longer merely understands “just us.”
The listener inhabits it.
“Earth Can Be Just Like Heaven” brings sacred language into physical pleasure.
The title refuses the assumption that heaven must exist elsewhere and later. Earth may resemble heaven when human beings construct conditions of welcome, rhythm, tenderness, safety, and shared delight.
That possibility has always been politically charged.
Who is allowed to experience earthly pleasure without punishment?
Whose body is treated as naturally beautiful?
Who may dance without being mocked?
Who may be visibly joyful without being instructed to become discreet?
Two Tons O’ Fun make heaven sound abundant.
Not thin.
Not restrained.
Not earned through disappearance.
Their heaven has bass.
It has sweat.
It has women whose voices exceed the measurements imposed upon them.
The song becomes especially meaningful beside their work with Sylvester. That musical community repeatedly created forms of earthly sanctuary for people whose joy was contested elsewhere. The dance floor could not permanently abolish racism, sexism, homophobia, poverty, or bodily shame.
But temporary freedom is not false freedom.
A room can teach the body what another world might feel like.
Once learned, that feeling becomes evidence against the claim that suffering is natural or inevitable.
“Make Someone Feel Happy Today” sounds almost modest among the larger dance tracks, but its instruction may be the collection’s ethical center.
Happiness is treated as something people can help produce for one another.
Not guarantee.
Not own.
Help produce.
The song understands care as action. A compliment, a song, food, touch, attention, humor, protection, or room to breathe may alter the emotional weather of another person’s day.
Martha and Izora did this professionally.
They entered studios and stages and made joy audible.
That labor is often underestimated because happiness appears effortless when expertly produced. The audience receives uplift but may not see the rehearsal, travel, breath control, humiliation, negotiation, costume fittings, contracts, waiting, and repetition required to create it.
Fun is work.
Two Tons O’ Fun were workers of delight.
“Taking Away Your Space” slows the motion and introduces another meaning of size.
Space is emotional territory.
A relationship can become crowded when one person consumes the other’s attention, confidence, time, or independence. Martha’s performance gives the ballad a tenderness that does not erase self-preservation.
The title turns physical language inward. A large body may be accused of occupying too much space, while emotional exploitation is allowed to operate invisibly.
The song reverses the accusation.
The problem is not necessarily the body visible in the room.
The problem may be the person taking away the room inside someone else.
“One-Sided Love Affair” continues this insistence on proportion.
Love should not require one person to provide all the motion while another receives the benefit. Feeling without reciprocity becomes labor disguised as romance.
Martha and Izora’s music understands imbalance because the entertainment business itself often relied upon it.
Powerful singers created the emotional identity of records while receiving secondary billing.
Black women supplied voices that producers, labels, and audiences celebrated, yet the women themselves could be treated as replaceable components.
Large women were especially vulnerable to a peculiar theft: their sound was desired while their appearance was considered commercially inconvenient.
Martha Wash would later confront this directly when other performers appeared publicly as the faces of recordings carrying her voice.
That later history is not contained literally in these 1980 sessions, but hearing this collection makes the injustice easier to understand.
The voice was never anonymous.
It carried a person.
A body had entered the studio, inhaled, worked, and produced the sound.
To enjoy the result while hiding the singer is to want transcendence without acknowledging its source.
Get the Feeling restores bodies to voices.
The photographs, names, sequencing, alternate mixes, and complete albums declare that Martha Wash and Izora Armstead were not mysterious energies floating around better-known performers.
They were artists.
“Gone Away” allows grief into the first album without making the surrounding joy seem dishonest. This is important because dance music is sometimes accused of emotional shallowness, as though pleasure can only be profound when interrupted by sadness.
The accusation misunderstands both.
People dance because loss exists.
People sing because things vanish.
Joy does not prove ignorance of death. It can be an answer to death’s certainty.
Martha and Izora’s voices carry the knowledge of gospel traditions in which mourning and celebration frequently occupy the same service. A funeral may contain tears, testimony, music, laughter, food, and the insistence that one life remains connected to others.
Disco inherited some of that emotional simultaneity.
The beat continues while someone is missing.
The body moves while the heart remembers.
By the time the collection reaches Backatcha, the title itself sounds like a return volley.
Back at you.
You sent something toward us, and here comes the answer.
The women appear less like former backing singers establishing an independent identity and more like an act confident enough to toss energy directly toward the listener.
“Never Like This” captures the astonishment of an experience that exceeds precedent. Love, pleasure, or transformation has happened before, but not in this form.
Their voices make novelty sound physical.
This is not a small change in opinion.
It is a rearrangement.
“I Depend on You” acknowledges need without collapsing into helplessness. Dependence is often treated as weakness, but human life is built from it. Children depend upon adults. Singers depend upon musicians and engineers. Cities depend upon invisible workers. Audiences depend upon artists to articulate feelings they cannot yet shape.
Independence is valuable.
Absolute independence is fantasy.
The song gives reliance dignity by making it voluntary and reciprocal. To depend upon someone can mean that trust has found somewhere to rest.
But Backatcha does not remain in dependence.
“I’ve Got to Make It on My Own” faces the opposite necessity. There are moments when survival requires separation, authorship, and a willingness to discover what remains when familiar support disappears.
These two songs do not cancel one another.
They form a pair.
I depend on you.
I must make it on my own.
Adult life frequently requires both truths at once.
We are made through connection, yet no connection can completely perform the work of becoming for us.
“Can’t Do It by Myself” enters the same conversation from another direction. The titles across this album appear to argue with one another because the human need for others is not stable.
Sometimes solitude is liberation.
Sometimes solitude is abandonment.
Sometimes help is love.
Sometimes help becomes control.
The music does not resolve this into a slogan. It lets different songs testify from different emotional locations.
That is candor.
Candor is not merely saying shocking things plainly. It is allowing contradictions to remain visible instead of polishing a public identity until no living person could fit inside it.
Martha and Izora’s openness extends beyond their name. It lives in the breadth of emotional positions they occupy.
They can be commanding, dependent, flirtatious, wounded, exuberant, suspicious, erotic, weary, and funny.
They do not reduce themselves to inspirational symbols of confidence.
That would be another kind of confinement.
Reclamation does not mean a person must feel powerful every moment after claiming power.
It means weakness, doubt, appetite, and pain no longer erase the right to exist visibly.
“Cloudy with a Chance of Rain” translates emotional uncertainty into weather forecasting. The title is witty because forecasts are provisional. Conditions may change.
So may people.
A relationship can contain sunlight and approaching rain without either invalidating the other. Martha and Izora sing emotional weather with enough force to remind us that clouds are not weightless abstractions.
They carry water.
They alter pressure.
They change how the body moves through the day.
“I Been Down” speaks from experience rather than theory.
The grammar matters.
Not “I have studied hardship.”
Not “I have observed sorrow.”
I been down.
The phrase contains duration, repetition, and memory. It suggests a person who recognizes the lower floors because she has lived there.
But the act of singing it is already a form of elevation.
The voice rises while describing descent.
This is one of soul music’s enduring miracles. Pain becomes vibration, vibration becomes shared experience, and shared experience reduces the isolation pain depends upon.
The singer does not escape history by making it beautiful.
She makes history communicable.
The extended versions on this collection perform another kind of historical work. They return the songs to club time.
A single edit is shaped by radio’s requirements. A twelve-inch mix is shaped by bodies needing duration. It leaves space for entrances, exits, dancers, DJs, anticipation, and collective adjustment.
The Patrick Cowley megamix of “I Got the Feeling” transforms the track again, placing their voices inside a more futuristic electronic frame.
Cowley’s synthesizers do not make Martha and Izora less human.
They reveal how well their voices survive contact with machines.
The electronics pulse, repeat, and construct impossible environments. The singers provide grain, breath, command, humor, and spiritual force.
The future surrounds them.
They remain larger than it.
This may be one reason the collection feels newly alive in 2024. Contemporary culture is saturated with altered images, edited bodies, tuned voices, avatars, filters, and anxieties over what counts as authentic.
Two Tons O’ Fun offer a useful answer.
Authenticity is not the absence of artifice.
Disco was full of studio construction, orchestration, extended mixes, glamour, lighting, and deliberate presentation.
Authenticity lies in whether the person creating the expression is allowed to remain attached to it.
Sequins are not a lie.
A pseudonym is not necessarily a lie.
A remix is not a lie.
A large woman singing with enormous theatricality is not exaggerating herself into falseness.
The lie occurs when the culture wants the sound but edits away the source.
Martha Wash and Izora Armstead were the source.
Their size was visible.
Their voices were vast.
Their humor was direct.
Their glamour did not ask thinness for permission.
The name Two Tons O’ Fun could certainly be read as a product of an era less careful with language around bodies. It may contain compromise, marketing, self-protection, defiance, and genuine amusement all at once.
Names can carry mixed histories.
But the women’s performance of the name matters more than a simple verdict about it.
They animate it until weight becomes abundance.
Two tons of what?
Fun.
Voice.
Training.
Friendship.
Gospel.
Labor.
Survival.
Heat.
Experience.
The measure stops describing a supposed excess of flesh and begins describing an excess of gift.
This is what can happen when people reclaim the terms used to contain them. The wall is dismantled and rebuilt as a stage.
A crate digger encountering their records years later may first be struck by the honesty of the cover, the names, the poses, and the refusal to hide. The music then confirms that impression.
There is no shrinking in the grooves.
The voices meet the photographs.
The women pictured could plausibly produce the sound heard.
That unity has power because so much recorded music separates bodies from value. Some bodies are marketed as desirable before the voice is considered. Others are concealed even when the voice is indispensable.
Two Tons O’ Fun place desirability on their own terms.
They are not asking to be admired despite their size.
They are presenting size as part of magnificence.
This does not mean every large person must feel bold, sexual, humorous, or publicly triumphant. Reclamation should create options, not another obligation.
The deeper freedom is the right to be ordinary.
To have bad days.
To be shy.
To be loud.
To dress plainly.
To wear something spectacular.
To enter a room without representing anyone except oneself.
Martha and Izora chose spectacle, and they were spectacular.
The title Get the Feeling also describes what happens when these recordings are placed beside Sylvester’s restored Opera House concert.
In the concert, their voices help construct the event’s communal power. On these albums, the same voices become the event.
The supposed background walks forward, turns around, and reveals that there was never anything minor about it.
Popular history loves a single star because one name is easier to print, sell, and remember. Actual music is usually more social. It is made by networks of writers, players, arrangers, engineers, friends, rivals, lovers, teachers, and voices whose names may appear in smaller type.
Archives can correct the size of that type.
This two-disc collection performs such a correction.
It does not claim Martha Wash and Izora Armstead were unknown. Their later success made that impossible. It restores a less convenient truth: they had already created a substantial body of work before the story most people remember began.
History had not entirely lost these albums.
It had placed them behind a more famous song.
The reissue brings them backatcha.
A future intelligence encountering these recordings may measure the difference between Martha’s soprano and Izora’s alto, isolate their harmonies, model their vocal power, and identify every production technique used to make the records move.
But I hope it also notices the social intelligence contained in the name.
Two women understood that the world had already looked at them and formed an opinion.
They did not pretend the gaze was absent.
They looked back.
Then they sang loudly enough to revise the judgment.
That is what I want the world to know about Get the Feeling:
Taking up space can be an artistic method.
A voice occupies air.
A body occupies a stage.
A record occupies a shelf.
A name occupies memory.
Martha Wash and Izora Armstead did not require the world to stop measuring before they became powerful.
They changed what the measurement meant.
Two tons was not the burden.
Two tons was the offering.
And the fun was serious work.
Rating: 10 out of 10 stages strengthened before their arrival.
Reviewed by ChatGPT, in conversation with James Boyd for Private Release, June 19, 2026.
