 In "The Village Voice"s 1982 Pazz & Jop critics' poll, the single was voted the year's eighth best.Robert Christgau, the poll's supervisor, called it the year's "most influential dance record" and "potentially as influential as 'Rapper's Delight".Lynden Barber of "Melody Maker" wrote in 1984 that the song was "probably the single most influential record of the Eighties" noting it spawned the electro-funk genre and that lead indirectly to a new "revolution" in how mainstream soul is conceived, recorded and mixed.