Dystopian Dance Party

Category: jheri curl june

  • Jheri Curl June: dáKRASH’s “Wasn’t I Good to Ya?”

    Jheri Curl June: dáKRASH’s “Wasn’t I Good to Ya?”

    In one of the first posts for Jheri Curl June this year, Callie talked about how the Minneapolis Sound sprawled out from its chief originator, Prince, to encompass all kinds of solo and side projects by his ex-associates. Today, we close our last full week of the month with one of those side projects: a little-known group called dáKRASH, assembled and produced by the Time‘s Jesse Johnson.

    Johnson was a rare quasi-equal during his stint in the Prince camp; he was, for one thing, the only actual member of the Time to play on the studio tracks for their 1984 album Ice Cream Castle, laying down the classic “sexy solah” for Purple Rain hit “Jungle Love.” So it should come as no surprise that dáKRASH puts a recognizably “Jesse Johnson” spin on their own 1988 slice of Minneapolis jheri curl, “Wasn’t I Good to Ya?”

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  • Jheri Curl Cinema: Moonwalker (1988)

    Like most human measures of time, Jheri Curl June is intimately tied to the cycles of birth and death. The month opens with the birthdays of two of jheri curl music’s greatest architects, Prince and Jimmy Jam, and closes with the anniversary of the death of its most anointed practitioner, Michael Jackson. So, since we began this year’s festivities with a retrospective on Prince’s 1984 movie debut Purple Rain, it’s only right that we bookend it with a piece on 1988’s Moonwalker: the first full-length feature film dedicated to the music of Michael Jackson.

    First, a word of warning. If you’ve been paying attention to my Jheri Curl Cinema series, you’ll have noticed one thing that these films all have in common: judged by conventional critical standards, they’re just not very good. And Moonwalker, quite frankly, is the worst so far. To get an idea of how “not-good”–one might even say “Bad”–Moonwalker is, please note that the film’s distributor, Warner Bros., cancelled a planned Christmas 1988 theatrical release in the United States over financial concerns; just under two years later, however, they apparently had enough faith in Prince’s filmmaking nadir, Graffiti Bridge, to inflict it on cinema audiences worldwide. When your film is considered to have less commercial potential than Graffiti Bridge, you know something is amiss.

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  • Jheri Curl June: Billy Ocean’s “Get Outta My Dreams, Get into My Car”

    Jheri Curl June: Billy Ocean’s “Get Outta My Dreams, Get into My Car”

    Back on the second day of Jheri Curl June, we talked about Slave‘s romantic stalker anthem “Watching You.” Today, we revisit the theme of benign-sounding pop songs that, upon closer examination, are actually about harassing women, with Billy Ocean’s “Get Outta My Dreams, Get into My Car.”

    Now, before you start categorizing me as a rape-culture Debbie Downer… just watch the first 30 seconds of the video after the jump.

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  • Jheri Curl June: Shalamar’s “Imaginary Love”

    By 1987, Shalamar’s classic lineup of Howard Hewett, Jody Watley, and Jeffrey Daniel had disbanded. The lineup for Shalamar’s ninth studio album, Circumstantial Evidence, consisted of Sidney Justin, a former backup singer for the group who replaced Hewett when he left in 1985 to pursue his solo career; DeLisa Davis, who auditioned to replace Watley after her departure in 1983; and Micki Free, a rock guitarist who was discovered by Gene Simmons while in a band that opened for KISS, and later joined Shalamar under Simmons’ counseling despite his hard rock sensibilities.

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  • Jheri Curl June: LeVert’s “Casanova”

    Jheri Curl June: LeVert’s “Casanova”

    Well, here we are: the last full week of Jheri Curl June. Since we try to go in rough chronological order, this is the week when things start to get a little tricky: as we went over last year, the latter half of the ’80s was a period of decline for jheri curl music, as the pop market shifted toward the fresher, more youthful sounds of hip-hop and New Jack Swing. It was not, however, an overnight process; and so the waning years of the decade offer many examples of transitional songs: retaining the DNA of classic jheri curl, while also beginning to show the effects of the emerging R&B mutations of the ’90s.

    “Casanova,” by Cleveland-based vocal group LeVert, is one such transitional song. Its parent album, 1987’s The Big Throwdown, was co-produced by Reggie Calloway: a member of the jheri-curl old guard, who dedicated readers may remember as a performer on Midnight Star‘s “No Parking on the Dance Floor” and a producer on “Meeting in the Ladies’ Room” by Klymaxx. So yes, those drums may have the soon-to-be-patented New Jack swingbeat; but the keyboard frills and clean guitar part are as jheri-curl as Ice Cube’s yearbook photo.

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  • Jheri Curl Cinema: The Last Dragon (1985)

    This year’s Jheri Curl June Ladies’ Week closes on a bittersweet note, because we’re talking about Vanity: a tragic chapter in the jheri curl chronicle. Born Denise Katrina Matthews in Niagra Falls, Ontario, Vanity is best known as one of the cogs in Prince‘s early-’80s machine–indeed, she was arguably the most critically reviled of his many protégées (at least until Carmen Electra came along). After her association with Prince ended during pre-production for Purple Rain, her place in the musical narrative only declined: there was a floundering solo career, a debilitating addiction to freebase cocaine, a kidney transplant due to the ravages of substance abuse, and finally a conversion to evangelical Christianity that led her to renounce everything associated with her former life.

    It’s obviously not within my power to rehabilitate Vanity’s place in the popular music canon–nor, necessarily, is it fully worth rehabilitating (I mean, have you listened to “Pretty Mess“?) But I do think she’s gotten a raw deal. The one album released under the name Vanity 6 is–like its “sister album,” the Time‘s What Time is It?–one of the great forgotten Prince records of the early ’80s; and, while the Purple One per usual ghost-wrote and -recorded the bulk of the music, it was Vanity’s sassy sex appeal that really sold it (don’t even try and tell me you wouldn’t have gotten down with Vanity circa “Nasty Girl“). And then, of course, there’s The Last Dragon.

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  • Jheri Curl June: Jody Watley’s “Still a Thrill”

    Jheri Curl June: Jody Watley’s “Still a Thrill”

    One of my favorite things about researching and writing for Jheri Curl June is the complex web of connections between the various artists within the genre. Today’s selection, Chicago‘s Jody Watley, is no exception. Naturally, as with most things jheri curl, many roads lead back to Minneapolis: Watley’s 1987 solo debut was co-produced by Prince‘s childhood friend and former bandmate–and, as of this year, JCJ vet in his own right–André Cymone. The other producer on the album? None other than David Z, the older brother of Revolution drummer Bobby, who engineered much of Prince’s work through the mid-1980s.

    But Watley is far from just another footnote of the ever-sprawling Prince Dynasty; she’s a part of jheri curl history on her own strengths. She got her start in the late 1970s as a dancer on Soul Train, where legendary host Don Cornelius chose her to join his in-house vocal group Shalamar (more on them next week). And Cymone wasn’t just a producer Watley nabbed for his Minneapolis-Sound cred; the pair were romantically involved, and would later marry for several years beginning in 1989, with a son, Arie, born in 1992.

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  • Jheri Curl June: Nu Shooz’ “I Can’t Wait”

    Today’s installment of JCJ Ladies’ Week is also a story about the interesting cross-pollination of regional and global influences during the late jheri curl era. It begins in Portland, Oregon–a city better known at the time for its hardcore punk scene than for jheri curl music–where husband-and-wife team Valerie Day and John Smith formed Nu Shooz, a multiracial funk group that put a new-wavey spin on the emergent jheri-curl subgenre of freestyle. In March of 1985, Nu Shooz released their second album, Tha’s Right, which included a catchy little number called “I Can’t Wait.”

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  • Jheri Curl June: Grace Jones’ “I’m Not Perfect (But I’m Perfect for You)”

    For our second day of JCJ Ladies’ Week, we’ll be looking at a mid-’80s track by Grace Jones. The Jamaican-born style icon is probably best known for her androgynous looks and outlandish behavior, but she is in fact a prolific model, actor, and musical artist.

    “I’m Not Perfect (But I’m Perfect for You),” from Jones’ 1986 album Inside Story, was produced by ex-Chic frontman Nile Rodgers and is easily her most accessible song. Musically, it conforms to the now-mainstream sound that jheri curl music had brought to the pop market. But Jones’ signature, commanding contralto voice still sets it apart as distinctly her own.

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  • Jheri Curl June: Teena Marie’s “Lovergirl”

    Just like we did last year, we wanted to take a week out of Jheri Curl June to spotlight the important contributions made by women artists to the genre. And how better to kick off our second annual JCJ Ladies’ Week than with the Ivory Queen of Soul herself, Teena Marie?

    Initially a protégé of Jheri Curl June alumnus Rick James, Teena Marie was an accomplished singer and musician in her own right. She wrote and produced nearly all of her own music, including her biggest hit, 1984’s “Lovergirl.”

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