The 1980s File Feature
Cleanin' Up The Town
The Bus Boys and "Cleanin' Up The Town" The Bus Boys were a Los Angeles-based rock and R&B group notable both for their music and for their status as one of …
01 The Story
The Bus Boys and "Cleanin' Up The Town"
The Bus Boys were a Los Angeles-based rock and R&B group notable both for their music and for their status as one of the first racially integrated rock bands to achieve significant commercial visibility in the early 1980s. The group recorded "Cleanin' Up The Town" for the Ghostbusters film soundtrack, released in 1984 on Arista Records. The soundtrack was one of the defining cultural artifacts of the summer of 1984, driven primarily by Ray Parker Jr.'s iconic title theme but including contributions from several other artists whose songs were placed at strategic points in the film and on the accompanying album.
The Bus Boys had been formed in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, initially building an audience through club performances and developing a sound that blended rock guitar energy with R&B rhythm structures and a distinctive punk-influenced directness. Their name and visual presentation, drawing on the imagery of service-industry workers and working-class life, gave them a conceptual distinctiveness that set them apart from both the mainstream rock and mainstream R&B acts of their era. The group approached their identity with a self-awareness and wit that informed everything from their visual presentation to their songwriting.
"Cleanin' Up The Town" was written specifically for and about the Ghostbusters film, with lyrics that made direct reference to the film's premise of paranormal pest control. This kind of purpose-written soundtrack material was common for major studio releases in the 1980s, when the commercial potential of film soundtracks as album products had been well established by successes including Saturday Night Fever and Flashdance. The song combined the Bus Boys' characteristic rock-R&B fusion with lyrics tailored to the film's supernatural comic setting, requiring the group to adapt their style to a specific narrative context while retaining their musical identity.
The Ghostbusters soundtrack was produced with significant industry attention and featured production contributions designed to complement the film's tone of comic supernatural adventure. The Bus Boys' track occupied a position within the album that capitalized on their energetic live performance reputation, with a recording that translated something of their club-circuit urgency into a polished studio product suited to mainstream radio airplay and the broader commercial audience the film was reaching.
The single entered the Billboard Hot 100 on August 4, 1984, at position 86. It climbed to its peak of number 68 during the week of August 18, 1984, spending five weeks on the chart before departing. The chart performance was modest compared to the Ray Parker Jr. title theme, which spent three weeks at number one and became one of the most recognizable pop songs of the decade, but the Bus Boys' track benefited from its association with one of the summer's biggest cultural phenomena and reached listeners who might not have encountered the group otherwise.
Ghostbusters, directed by Ivan Reitman and starring Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and Ernie Hudson, became one of the highest-grossing films of 1984 and one of the most commercially successful comedies in Hollywood history up to that point. The film's cultural penetration was extraordinary, generating merchandise, a cartoon series, and a sustained pop culture presence that extended well beyond its initial release period. Any song associated with the film benefited from this massive visibility, even if the chart performance of individual tracks varied considerably.
The Bus Boys had previously gained attention for their appearance in 48 Hrs. (1982), another major studio release where their music was prominently featured. This pattern of film placement was a significant part of their commercial strategy during this period, using high-visibility entertainment contexts to reach audiences beyond their existing rock and club-circuit fan base. Their combination of visual distinctiveness and genre-crossing sound made them effective representatives for films that themselves crossed genre boundaries and resisted easy categorization.
After the peak of their film placement success in the early and mid-1980s, the Bus Boys continued to record and perform but did not sustain the mainstream commercial profile that the Ghostbusters association had briefly provided. "Cleanin' Up The Town" remains the most widely recognized entry in their discography, preserved in the cultural memory maintained by the continued popularity of the Ghostbusters franchise across multiple sequels and reboots that have kept the original film in circulation for successive generations of audiences.
02 Song Meaning
The Meaning of "Cleanin' Up The Town" by the Bus Boys
"Cleanin' Up The Town" is a purpose-written soundtrack song, meaning its meaning is inseparable from the film context for which it was created. The track was written for the 1984 Ghostbusters film, and its lyrical content directly references the film's premise: a team of paranormal investigators who capture and contain supernatural entities threatening the urban environment.
The phrase "cleanin' up the town" functions as a double metaphor. At its most literal level, it describes the Ghostbusters' activity of removing ghosts from New York City. At a slightly more figurative level, it invokes the traditional Western and crime-genre image of the heroic figure who restores order to a corrupted or chaotic community. This imagery gave the song a comic heroism appropriate to the film's tone of supernatural comedy in which the protagonists were simultaneously competent and ridiculous.
For the Bus Boys as a band, the song also engaged with themes that had been present in their earlier work. Their commitment to working-class imagery and service-sector identity, reflected in their very name, found an ironic echo in a song about a group of professionals whose job was essentially the supernatural equivalent of pest control or sanitation work. The Ghostbusters themselves were working-class heroes of a kind, charging fees for their services, operating out of a converted fire station, and dealing with the unglamorous logistics of an unusual business.
The Bus Boys' rock-R&B sound was itself part of the song's meaning. Their genre-crossing approach suited a film that was itself a genre hybrid, combining comedy, horror, science fiction, and action-adventure elements in a way that had not been done quite that way before. A song that did not fit neatly into any single musical category was in some sense the right soundtrack for a film that resisted categorical definition.
The song's energy is also important to its meaning in context. Placed at the end of the film, it functions as a celebratory release, the musical equivalent of the credits rolling after a victory, an invitation to the audience to exit the theater with their energy up and their satisfaction at the story's resolution intact. This is a specific and valuable function for a song to serve, and "Cleanin' Up The Town" fulfills it effectively.
Decades after its release, the song retains its association with the Ghostbusters franchise and the nostalgic pleasure that audiences take in revisiting the cultural touchstones of 1984. Its meaning has accumulated the additional layer of period specificity: it is now a document of a particular moment in Hollywood entertainment and in the history of the film-music commercial relationship, as well as a record of an underappreciated band's moment of cultural visibility.
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