Tag: gap band
Jheri Curl June: Cameo’s “Flirt”
It’s a testament to the depth and breadth of Jheri Curl Music that in five Jheri Curl Junes, only two bands have been featured repeatedly: Slave (with 2015’s “Watching You” and 2017’s “Turn You Out”) and the Gap Band (who kicked off 2015 with “You Dropped a Bomb on Me,” followed by last year’s “Disrespect”).…
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…
Jheri Curl June: The Gap Band’s “Disrespect”
Last Thursday, June 7, would have been Prince’s 60th birthday had he: a) not passed away in April 2016, and b) believed in concepts as prosaic as “birthdays” and “years.” Last week also happened to mark the underwhelming conclusion of the beef between rappers Pusha T and Drake, which just a few short weeks ago…
Jheri Curl June: Pennye Ford’s “Change Your Wicked Ways”
Penny Ford (a.k.a. Pennye Ford, for reasons unknown) began her musical career as a backup singer for Zapp in 1979 and went on to become a session singer at Motown in Los Angeles before signing to Total Experience Records, home of Gap Band and Yarbrough & Peoples. So, needless to say, her Jheri Curl credentials were…
Jheri Curl June: Yarbrough & Peoples’ “Guilty”
In many ways, Yarbrough & Peoples offer a much more pleasant male-female music partnership dynamic than earlier Jheri Curl June inductees René & Angela. Calvin Leon Yarbrough and Alisa Delois Peoples were childhood friends who eventually became a musical duo. After being discovered by the Gap Band and Lonnie Simmons, they recorded their best-known hit, “Don’t Stop the Music,” in 1980. They…
Introduction to Jheri Curl June 2: Electric Boogaloo
That’s right, folks, it’s finally here: Jheri Curl June has returned, and this year it’s going to be even better than before. For those of you new to the party, I wrote an introduction last year that I highly recommend, as it provides a definition and brief history of the genre we like to call…