Dystopian Dance Party

Author: zachary.hoskins@gmail.com

  • Podcast: Dystöpian Böök Clüb vs. Mötley Crüe’s The Dirt

    After almost three years of ripping on trashy rock biographies with Dystopian Book Club, it was only a matter of time for us to get around to the trashiest of them all: Neil Strauss’ and Mötley Crüe’s masterpiece of filth-wallowing, The Dirt. The two-hour conversation we had doesn’t even begin to cover everything in the book, but we think it will give you a good idea of what to expect from the movie adaptation that just premiered on Netflix. Thanks to our YouTube subscribers Bruce Gaskins and Tony Bernardo for recommending we cover this book–I think it’s obvious that it gave us a lot of joy.

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  • Podcast: Dystopian Book Club vs. Mark Paytress’ Bolan: The Rise and Fall of a 20th Century Superstar

    September is kind of our unofficial Marc Bolan month at Dystopian Dance Party; so for this installment of our Dystopian Book Club podcast series, we thought we’d read the excellent 2006 biography Bolan: The Rise and Fall of a 20th Century Superstar by music journalist Mark Paytress. This one goes a little bit long (sorry ’bout that), but there’s plenty of music to keep you entertained!

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  • Dystopian Dance Party Mailbag!

    As we’ve mentioned on the podcast, we’ve been cultivating a vibrant fan community on our YouTube page, so we decided it was high time that we shared some of the love. Here’s a video of us sharing some of our favorite comments from some of the dumbest members of the KISS Army; and if you want more ammunition to insult us with, look out for our print KISS issue this October!

  • Podcast: Dystopian Book Club vs. David Lee Roth’s Crazy from the Heat

    Heard ya missed us, we’re back! After a year-long absence, the Dystopian Book Club returns with an extensive look at Crazy from the Heat, the memoir/literary classic/deranged, barely coherent rantings of former Van Halen frontman, raconteur, and assless pants aficionado David Lee Roth. So limber up, slip into your comfiest Spandex, and maybe treat yourself to a powdered doughnut or two (wink, wink)–this may be our most fun book club since Peter Criss. Thanks to Matt from Toronto for sending in a question and making sure we didn’t take our shirts off for nothing.

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  • Jheri Curl June: Jeffrey Osborne’s “One Love – One Dream”

    Somehow, despite his over-decade-long tenure as lead singer for the proto-JCM group L.T.D., we still haven’t gotten around to covering Jeffrey Osborne for Jheri Curl June. But as we say goodbye to our fifth annual celebration of all things Jheri Curl, it feels right to end on the title track from Osborne’s 1988 solo album One Love – One Dream. After all, it’s our one love for Jheri Curl Music that brings us together every year, and our one dream for the wet, silky R&B music of the 1980s to get the recognition it deserves.

    But most importantly, “One Love – One Dream” just sounds like it could be the song rolling over the credits of Jheri Curl Music: The Movie. The dry rhythm guitar and softly tinkling synthesizers sound instantly nostalgic in an R&B market dominated by the emerging New Jack Swing; it’s the song you listen to the night you take your jheri curl for one last spin, before trimming it into a hi-top fade. But as Osborne sings, in that sonorous voice that launched a thousand barbecues, “We’ve been together for a long time, baby / And our feelings have never died / Don’t think that anyone could break us up / Because you really mean the world to me / There’s no deeper emotion / I only want you and I’m filled with devotion.” He may not have been singing those lines to a jheri curl (okay, he definitely wasn’t)–but he totally could have been, and that’s the important thing.

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  • Jheri Curl June: Bobby Brown’s “Don’t Be Cruel”

    As we’ve mentioned before, by the late 1980s, the sound of mainstream R&B was developing into what would become known as New Jack Swing. We’ve been writing about this for five years now, so if you don’t get it by now, let me explain it in Pokémon terms: your starter Pokémon is Disco. With love, attention, and experience, that eventually evolves into Jheri Curl Music. New Jack Swing is its final form. The basic elements exist throughout, but the forms morph into a larger, stronger monster.

    Bobby Brown’s “Don’t Be Cruel” was written and produced by Jheri Curl June inductees L.A. Reid and Babyface; and while it knocks harder than their work with the Deele, it still maintains much of the wet, silky flair of Jheri Curl Music.

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  • Jheri Curl June Special: André Cymone

    It’s a poetic fluke of the cosmos that so many Jheri Curl Music innovators’ birthdays fall in June, the genre’s holiest month. So far, we’ve highlighted Prince (June 7), Jimmy Jam (June 6), L.A. Reid (also June 7), and Jesse Johnson (June 1)–as well as Michael Jackson, who passed away on June 25, 2009. Now, on the occasion of his 60th birthday, it’s finally time to induct André Cymone into the JCM Hall of Fame.

    As Prince’s earliest musical collaborator, André Cymone played an integral, but regrettably overshadowed part in the creation of the Jheri Curl Music strain more popularly known as the Minneapolis Sound. On our Prince associates podcast from a couple of years ago, I described Cymone as the twin Prince (figuratively, of course) consumed in utero. So many of the more famous artist’s stylistic choices in the first three years of his career–from his embrace of New Wave sounds and fashions to the whole song “Do Me, Baby”–can be more accurately interpreted as a collaborative effort between himself and his one-time surrogate brother. By the time André, understandably fed up with the lack of credit for his work, went solo in early 1981, the persona known as “Prince” had been more or less fully formed; this inevitably did his longtime partner a disservice by making his solo career look like an imitation.

    But today we celebrate André Cymone not as an imitator, but as the innovator he was. While he may not have scaled the critical or commercial heights of his musical other half, his efforts–both behind the scenes and in the spotlight–left an indelible mark on Jheri Curl Music, and on the last 30 years of pop and R&B in general.

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  • Jheri Curl June: Lillo Thomas’ “Sexy Girl”

    Lillo Thomas is something of a renaissance man. Besides being a former world-class sprinter (he qualified for the 1984 Olympics, but was prevented from participating due to a car accident), he is also an actor, painter, and of course, a singer. Thomas provided vocals for several Jheri Curl June veterans including Evelyn “Champagne” King and Kashif. He also worked with Paul Laurence, a Jheri Curl June inductee from earlier this month. In fact, Thomas’ “Sexy Girl”–not to be confused with the 1984 jam by the late Glenn Frey–was cowritten by Laurence.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Go5JPaa_1mc

    “Sexy Girl” begins as your standard late-era Jheri Curl song with a thumping, New Jack Swing-esque beat; but the chorus, where Thomas’ vocals reach a soaring falsetto, is where the song really takes off. Unfortunately, “Sexy Girl” is not available on Spotify, and there is no official video, but I did find this vertically-oriented video of a shirtless guy Harlem Shaking to it that will just have to suffice. I think it does:

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  • Jheri Curl June: Charlie Singleton & Modern Man’s “Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained

    This is our fifth year of Jheri Curl June, and it continues to amaze me how little we have to search for new songs and artists to spotlight: even five years in, we still end each June with a backlog of tracks we weren’t able to cover. But, especially toward the end of the month, it doesn’t hurt to have a little help. That’s why I was grateful when a friend of the podcast, Berlin-via-DC DJ and nu-disco artist Snax, brought Charlie Singleton to my attention earlier this month.

    Not to be confused with the Charles Singleton who co-wrote “Strangers in the Night,” Charlie Singleton was a guitarist and songwriter who played a major role in the band Cameo’s early-’80s shift from George Clinton-style P-Funk to Jheri Curl Music–he contributed backing vocals and guitar to our 2014 Jheri Curl June inductee “Candy,” among many other tracks. But he was also the focal point of a few of his own groups, including the delightfully-named early-’80s boogie group Stargasm and his vehicle from later in the decade, Modern Man.

    The title track from Singleton’s second album with Modern Man, 1987’s “Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained” has all the makings of a late-period JCM masterpiece: Minneapolis-style synth hits, clean funk guitar, and backing vocals by Charlie’s pals in Cameo–including a healthy helping of Larry Blackmon’s signature “oww!”

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  • Jheri Curl June: Jane Child’s “Don’t Wanna Fall in Love”

    As we’ve mentioned time and time again, while Jheri Curl is both a musical genre and a hairstyle, a jheri curl is not required to make top-notch Jheri Curl Music. Jane Child is a prime example of an artist whose hair consisted of just about everything BUT a jheri curl, but who still made a banger that fits firmly within the JCM genre.

    Waist-length braids and spiky mohawk may not be the most conventional hairstyle, but it does not exclude one from making excellent Jheri Curl Music.

    Raised a classically trained pianist, Child wrote, arranged, and performed all of her self-titled 1989 debut, and was referred to by the press as “the female Prince” (like Prince, she was also signed to Warner Bros. at the time). Her first album is a great collection of late-era Jheri Curl Music, with plenty of synthesizer flares to smooth out the late-’80s hard rock guitars. “Don’t Wanna Fall in Love” is a catchy jam that was Number 2 on the Billboard charts for three weeks–kept out of the top spot, ironically, by Sinead O’Connor’s cover of the Prince-penned “Nothing Compares 2 U.”

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