Dystopian Dance Party

Category: jheri curl june

  • Jheri Curl June: Phil Collins’ “Sussudio”

    Okay, okay, I know what you’re thinking: who let this flaccid, schlocky dad-pop interloper into our pristine shrine to the jheri curl and the music it inspired? But just relax, and I’ll explain everything.

    After the massive success of Purple Rain in the summer of 1984, jheri curl music went from being a trendy form of R&B to one of the dominant modes of mainstream pop, full stop. Pretty soon, everybody was starting to sound a little jheri-curl–even people who had no business sounding that way. Even people who could never actually have a jheri curl of their own. People like the incurably lame, and just-as-incurably bald, Phil Collins.

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  • Jheri Curl June: The Deele’s “Stimulate”

    In 1989 Antonio “L.A.” Reid and Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds founded LaFace records, the record company responsible for Usher, OutKast, TLC, Pink, and Toni Braxton, among others.

    Back in 1985, though, they were sporting bright pink satin dress shirts and impressive jheri curls with the rest of the boys in the Deele, yet another funk and R&B outfit from Ohio.

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  • Jheri Curl Cinema: Purple Rain (1984)

    Jheri Curl June is, of course, first and foremost about the music. But, as I wrote in this year’s introductory post, jheri curl is also a profoundly visual form; it is, after all, the only genre of music to my knowledge named after a hairstyle. And so it only makes sense that we should also take some of the imagery associated with the music into consideration. That’s why this year, I’m happy to announce an entirely new feature dedicated to Jheri Curl Cinema. And there’s no other film more qualified to launch such a feature than Prince’s and Albert Magnoli’s 1984 cult classic Purple Rain.

    There are a few reasons why Purple Rain is so perfect for our inaugural Jheri Curl Cinema post. First, yesterday was of course Prince‘s 57th birthday–and while His Royal Badness presumably hasn’t celebrated his birthday since he became a Jehovah’s Witness in 2001, that just means we have to celebrate it twice as hard. But second, and more to the point, Purple Rain is an important film because it captures the essence of the Minneapolis scene in the early 1980s–and thus, by extension, the essence of jheri curl music itself.

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  • Jheri Curl June Special: Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis

    The main reason we celebrate Jheri Curl June in June is because, let’s face it, we are only human, and are as susceptible to the siren song of alliteration as the next group of hack Internet writers. But there’s also a pretty good justification for the timing, because the birthdays of two of jheri curl music’s most important innovators fall in the first week of June. We covered the first of those innovators, Prince, in last year’s inaugural Jheri Curl June Special.  So this time around, we’ll be discussing the other one: James “Jimmy Jam” Harris, born June 6, 1959.

    If Prince was jheri curl music’s architect, then Jimmy Jam and his longtime musical partner Terry Lewis were the brilliant engineers who shaped the structure to its fullest potential. Their take on the “Minneapolis Sound” developed by their former mentor added a new level of polish and sophistication; and when Prince shifted his own music away from traditional jheri-curl and toward neo-psychedelia in the mid-’80s, Jam and Lewis went in the opposite direction, crafting ever-more-flawless pop-friendly tracks that kept JCM in the top of the charts and, ultimately, evolved into the next dominant R&B sound, New Jack Swing.

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  • Jheri Curl June: André Cymone’s “Get It Girl”

    André Cymone, Prince‘s childhood friend and original touring bass player from ’79 to ’81, is one of a very long list of Prince casualties: including Jheri Curl June veteran (yes, that’s a thing) Jesse Johnson, Mark “Brownmark” Brown, Morris Day, Vanity, and others, all of whom were pissed off at Prince just enough to leave his musical empire and go solo… only to end up making second-rate Prince music on their own, some of which was even written by the Purple One himself. On a side note, it’s eerie that all these people also happened to look like second-rate versions of Prince–with the possible exception of Brownmark, although he could arguably have passed as a chubbier version.

    Anyway, before we get too far into diss territory, let me say that Cymone’s 1982 solo debut, Livin’ in the New Wave, is a freakin’ awesome album. Until I heard Livin’ in the New Wave, I had only heard unfinished bootleg versions of the Prince-authored tracks “So Fine” and “Trouble,” which gives it big Prince-nerd appeal. While it’s not a totally groundbreaking album, every song is at the least very listenable, and chock-full of interesting synthesizer blips and harmonies.

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  • Jheri Curl June: Zapp’s “Heartbreaker”

    Last June, we talked about Roger Troutman‘s “I Want to Be Your Man“–a classic jheri-curl ballad, completely worthy of inclusion in the annals of JCM history. But the song I really wanted to talk about was “Heartbreaker,” the 1983 hit by Troutman’s band Zapp. The reasons for this are obvious: first, because it’s a Zapp classic–a song scientifically engineered to be bumped as loud as one’s car speakers will allow, preferably while rolling through South Central L.A. in a 1961 Impala like Big Worm from Friday. And second, because it’s one of the few jheri-curl songs to make lyrical reference to an actual jheri curl: as Troutman croons through his vocoder at the beginning of the third verse, “Everybody thinks that you’re a nasty, nasty girl / Wearing short dresses and that sexy jheri curl.”

    The fact that Troutman and company knew a little something about “nasty” is obvious just from “Heartbreaker”‘s patented bass-heavy bounce. And as for whether they knew a little something about jheri curls…well…

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  • Jheri Curl June: Slave’s “Watching You”

    While jheri curl music is most often associated with the Minneapolis Sound, the Ohio funk scene can definitely be cited as another important influence. Ohio was a hotbed for funk music in the 1970s: Bootsy Collins, the Ohio Players, Zapp, the Isley Brothers, the O’Jays, and many others. But one of the lesser-known, and highly underrated, bands that came out of Ohio during this era was Slave. Sure, their musical evolution more or less followed the run-of-the-mill trail from hardcore, horn-heavy funk to disco-influenced funk, to a (sort of) mellower R&B funk, and of course, to the synthesizer-heavy sound of the mid-’80s. But Slave managed to develop their own, super-funky, inimitable style even while sticking with the status quo, and they are one of my personal favorites.

    By 1980, Slave, though still sounding very much like a ’70s funk outfit, had embraced a sleeker, more melodic sound. In “Watching You,” from their 1980 album Stone Jam, the hard-hitting horn section had been replaced with a doodling synthesizer riff. This, along with bassist Mark Adams’ signature heavy slap bass line at the forefront of the mix, makes this a very smooth, funky early jheri-curl groove.

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  • 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 Jheri Curl Music. In brief, though, JCM is R&B music, primarily from the early-to-mid-1980s, that “embodies the properties of the jheri curl itself.” It’s “an intrinsically hybrid style: somewhere between Black and white, kinky and straight, silky and dry. It’s fussy and high-maintenance. And, like the Jheri curl parody ‘Soul Glo‘ in John Landis’ 1988 comedy Coming to America, it leaves a greasy residue on everything it touches.”

    This year’s Jheri Curl June will follow the same basic format as last year’s: every weekday, we’ll update with a brief post highlighting a classic JCM cut, which we’ll also add to a growing Spotify playlist to be found at the bottom of each post. We’ll always try to provide something visual along with the music–jheri curl is, after all, a profoundly visual genre–but this time around we’re going to be a little less dependent on video clips, as there’s a lot of great jheri curl music that isn’t on YouTube (there’s a lot that isn’t on Spotify, too, but that’s a separate issue). Every week, probably on Fridays, we’ll also have a special feature post that goes into greater depth on a particular artist, album, or film. That’s right, I said film…look forward to a more in-depth discussion of Jheri Curl Cinema next week.

    Right now, though, I want to get right to the festivities. So join me after the jump, and find out who’s kicking off the second annual Jheri Curl June.

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  • Jheri Curl June: The Time’s “Jerk Out”

    Well, here we are: the last day of Jheri Curl June, and I don’t think there could be a better band to go out with than the greatest band in the world, the muthafuckin’ Time. Today’s selection, “Jerk Out,” comes from the earliest of the Time’s many reunion albums, 1990’s  Pandemonium: their first release as a group since 1984’s Ice Cream Castle, and the first time the supremely talented live band were allowed to play their own instruments on record. Like Full Force, the Time during this period represented a transitional moment, bridging the last gasps of jheri curl with the rise of New Jack Swing: just check out singer Morris Day’s hair in the video below, an unholy combination of a flat-top and a pompadour with a tiny rat-tail in the back that would never have passed muster in the first half of the ’80s. But the song itself dates from 1981, when ghostwriter Prince recorded a demo for the band’s second and greatest album, What Time is It? In a way, then, we’re taking “Jheri Curl June” full circle, with a song from the golden age of one of the genre’s greatest innovators, brushed off and updated by his most accomplished disciples to mark the end of an era.

    And what a way to go out: “Jerk Out” isn’t just a standout track on Pandemonium, it’s one of the best jheri curl songs ever. It perfectly captures both the Time’s smooth-as-silk funkiness and Day’s ludicrous persona of a squawk-laughing pimp daddy who coordinates the color of his suit with the color of his BMW (though not, it must be said, in the video, which is maddening if you’re even the slightest bit OCD). The song’s glossy production demonstrates all the tricks Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis learned during their (then) seven years as hitmaking producers for the likes of Janet Jackson and the Human League. The video, too, has everything a Time fan could possibly ask for: Morris preening in a selection of smoking jackets, a bewildering cameo by a Jack Nicholson impersonator in a Batman T-shirt, and of course, the obligatory post-48 Hrs. scene of Jesse Johnson playing one of his sexy solahs in a country and western bar while angry rednecks pelt the stage with beer bottles. And yes, of course, Jerome brings Morris a mirror before it’s all over.

    So there we have it: the end of Jheri Curl June. There are a lot of great jheri curl artists we have yet to cover, and we both had a lot of fun doing this, so I’m happy to announce that we’ll be doing it all over again next year. Yep, you heard it here first: I’m committed to keeping this blog up and running for at least another year, if only to give myself an excuse to spend another month writing about jheri curl music next summer. In the meantime, we hope you’ve enjoyed this maiden voyage of the S.S. Jheri Curl. Check out the now-finished Spotify playlist after the jump, and we’ll see you again next summer! (Or…you know, later this week, since we do post other things throughout the year. Seriously, don’t wait a whole year before coming back to this blog.)

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  • Jheri Curl June: Full Force’s “Love is for Suckers (Like Me and You)”

    As we discussed in a previous post, by the middle of the decade the popularity of jheri curl music was waning, thus making room for both hip-hop and New Jack Swing.  Full Force, who released their first album in 1985, combine equal parts of all three genres, helping to bridge the gap between JCM and New Jack Swing that many other jheri curl musicians crossed. This is evident in “Love is For Suckers (Like Me and You),” the first single from Full Force’s third album, 1987’s Guess Who’s Comin’ to the Crib?

    The video, an unwatchable nearly five minutes of aggressive goofiness set in what appears to be Pee Wee’s Playhouse, features the group (with either a child or a midget in a full-face helmet… maybe it’s a play on words?) breaking down a white family’s door to eat all their fried chicken and otherwise terrorize them until they disappear into thin air, apparently going back to the fantasy world from whence they came. The one where white spandex fringed bodysuits are fashionable.

    We have only one day left of Jheri Curl June, but our playlist is at a whopping 48 songs! Check it out after the jump.

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