The last week of Jheri Curl June is always a story of decline, and this year’s is no exception: like yesterday’s song by After 7, today’s closing track is more New Jack Swing with a residual curl than it is JCM proper. Hell, El DeBarge even appeared on the cover of its parent album, Gemini, with a hairstyle more appropriate for the dawn of the 1990s–and when El DeBarge loses his jheri curl, you know it’s the end of an era.

But true jheri curls never die, they just deactivate; and so it is that, when you listen past the prominent swingbeat on DeBarge’s 1989 single “Real Love,” you can still hear the echoes of a wetter, silkier bygone era, with those Jimmy Jam-esque keyboard stabs sounding like they came straight out of Minneapolis circa 1985.

So there you have it, we’ve come to the end of another Jheri Curl June. But we’ll be back for more in 2018; and you’re also welcome to check out our usual, only slightly less trivial content starting next week. Thanks for joining us!