Carrie Lucas began her career as a backup singer for the Whispers before signing to SOLAR Records. While she didn’t have any breakout hits during her solo career, 1982’s Still in Love is a Jheri Curl classic which includes a song produced by Nicholas Caldwell of the Whispers, as well as today’s Jheri Curl June song, “Men.”
What would Ladies’ Week be without a funky jaunt through the ways that men are absolute trash? “Men” begins with a list of the homekeeping duties and emotional labor that women are expected to do for men, asking, “Is this a woman’s place?” It’s feminism you can dance to!
We’ll be back tomorrow with more female-fronted Jheri Curl Music. Meanwhile, YouTube and Spotify playlists are below!
Each June, we set aside a week to celebrate the women of Jheri Curl Music. This year, we’re kicking off Jheri Curl June Ladies’ Week with not one, but three women: Melissa Bell, Marsha Carter, and Barbara Fowler, who together comprised the vocal trio Sinnamon.
Sinnamon’s 1982 single, “Thanks to You,” is a certified Jheri Curl jam: a sassy kiss-off to an ex-boyfriend whose “lovin’ services” are no longer required because the ladies of Sinnamon have “found somebody new.” The track’s sleek, futuristic beat and gospel-inspired vocals took it to the top of Billboard’s Hot Dance Music chart–making it by far the biggest success of the group’s brief recording career. But at least one person involved with “Thanks to You” was destined to go on to bigger and better things: the song’s 12″ mix was handled by KISS FM DJ Shep Pettibone, who would go on to become the remixer du jour for house-flavored tracks in the late ’80s and early ’90s.
We’ll be back tomorrow for Day 2 of Jheri Curl June Ladies’ Week. In the meantime, remember to check out the YouTube and Spotify playlists below!
It’s honestly shocking to me that in the six-year run of Jheri Curl June, we’ve never covered Ashford & Simpson, the ultimate soul music couple. Ashford & Simpson are what Jheri Curl June inductees René & Angela aspired to look like: a powerhouse singer-songwriter married couple.
Beginning their careers as successful songwriters, Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson wrote songs for Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles before joining Motown and continuing their trail of hits. But what we’re interested in here at Dystopian Dance Party is the second decade of Ashford & Simpson’s solo career: specifically, 1984’s Solid, when the couple went and got proverbial Jheri curls together.
Solid could be classified as a Jheri Curl album for the grown and sexy. Unlike most Jheri Curl Music that’s for the club or en route to the club, this is the album you put on when you’re about to pour champagne and have slow, sensual sex on satin sheets. It’s not spontaneous humpin’, this shit was planned out all week and you’re about to make this baby because it’s a Friday night AND the peak day of ovulation. Babies aren’t made in heaven, after all.
Anyway, let’s say you’ve poured out the champagne out and have been kissing and touching and all that, right? “Outta the World” is undressing and foreplay music. Things are getting steamy and wet now–you know, kind of like a Jheri curl. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: at its best, Jheri Curl Music sounds like the wetness of desire AND/OR the literal feel of a Jheri curl, and “Outta the World” is a perfect example of this. Now check out Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson’s sweet synchronized shoulder shrugs and get humpin’.
And with that, we’ll just leave you to start your weekend with the words “Ashford & Simpson” and “humpin’” emblazoned in your brain. Or, you can listen to the playlists below and try to clear your mind.
For this penultimate post in Week 2 of Jheri Curl June VIbe, I thought I’d highlight another piece of International Jheri Curl. This time, our world tour takes us to France: a country with a vibrant post-disco and boogie scene documented by Born Bad Records’ excellent Chébran compilations.
One of the highlights of Chébran Volume 2 (which I reviewed last June for Spectrum Culture) is this 1984 track by J.M. Black. “Lipstick (Shout!)” actually isn’t as “international” as you might expect: as the 7″ sleeve (above) proudly proclaims, it was recorded in the boogie ground zero of New York City. But Black’s bilingual vocals–complete with a rap!–give the smooth jheri-curl groove a certain je ne sais quoi of Continental cool and sophistication. You won’t know whether to dance or smoke a cigarette and stare morosely into the distance.
Tomorrow, we’ll return to our usual domestic JCM with another post from Callie. In the meantime, check out the growing playlists below!
Earlier this year when we lost James Ingram, I took that as an opportunity to delve deeper into his music. Although I was aware that he was an accomplished singer and songwriter, I was mainly familiar with “Yah Mo B There” and the fact that he helped turn “P.Y.T.” by Michael Jackson into the undisputed Jheri Curl banger that it is today.
If James Ingram was behind “P.Y.T.,” I knew he was bound to have some Jheri gems in his solo career; and lo and behold, the first track on his debut solo album, 1983’s It’s Your Night–nestled right there next “Yah Mo B There!”–is “Party Animal.” With its chickenscratch guitar and synth flourishes, “Party Animal” sounds like a companion to another early era Jheri Curl June inductee, Skyy’s “Call Me.”
Now enjoy this video of James Ingram performing “Party Animal” on stage alone like the nerd at the school talent show:
We at Dystopian Dance Party are, to put it mildly, super fucking hyped about the Bobby DeBarge biopic premiering later this month on TVOne: it’s basically the equivalent of Avengers: Endgame for fans of bad music movies, Jheri Curl Cinema, and/or Party City wigs. Since the movie is airing during the High Holy Month of Jheri Curl June, we’ll almost definitely do something around its release; in the meantime, though, here’s a song by DeBarge from their 1983 album In a Special Way.
“Be My Lady,” the album’s opening track, finds the DeBarge siblings in full-on Jacksons mode–in large part because the song’s bassline and vocal melody bear a more-than-passing resemblance to the latter group’s proto-JCM scorcher “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground).” But the swathes of synthesizers and soaring falsetto vocals–both courtesy of lead singer and producer El DeBarge–add a layer of jheri-curl grease even thicker than Jermaine’s. We can’t wait to hear the no-doubt-unlicensed soundalike on TV One in a couple of weeks.
In the meantime, listen to this and our other picks so far on the Spotify and YouTube playlists below. See you tomorrow!
Today’s Jheri Curl June inductee, Michael Wycoff, was a backup singer on Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life, as well as a contributor to some of 7th Wonder’s and Natalie Cole’s albums. In 1980 he began releasing solo albums, but it wasn’t until 1983’s On the Line that he fully embraced the Jheri.
Aside from the obvious musical qualifications of the title track in particular, On the Line also makes use of a red landline phone on the album cover. My theory, which I’m still fleshing out, is that the red phone is is a staple in Jheri Curl Music imagery: as you might recall from Jheri Curl June 2017, it also makes an appearance on the cover of Kleeer’s Intimate Connection.
We’ll be back with more Jheri Curl Music–and possibly even more red phones, who knows–tomorrow. In the meantime, YouTube and Spotify playlists are below!
Every year for Jheri Curl June, we go a little further out into the roots and branches of the genre. This year, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at some of the more far-flung examples of Jheri Curl Music from around the world: International Jheri Curl, if you will. One such example is “City Pop,” a loosely-defined subgenre of Western-influenced pop music that came to prominence during Japan’s economic boom of the 1970s and ’80s. Not all City Pop is Jheri Curl Music; the Japanese genre covers a wide swathe of styles, from AOR and soft rock to smooth jazz, synthpop, and disco. But some of it is so funky, you’d swear you were listening to an obscure New York boogie group.
That’s certainly the case for 1983’s “Wanna Kiss” by Hitomi Tohyama. Opening with a bassline “borrowed” from Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” and a chanted vocal hook straight out of the Chic playbook, it’s as funky as music for upwardly mobile Tokyoites gets; and Tohyama’s mannered J-pop vocals add a hint of umami to those sweet, juicy JCM keyboards. And yes, before you ask, the song’s B-side “Sexy Robot” also slaps.
We have some more International JCM lined up in the coming weeks; in the meantime, enjoy our ever-diversifying YouTube and Spotify playlists below!
Listen, I have been sitting on this Jheri Jam for a whole year, sustaining multiple burns on my ass from trying to contain this hot track. But, before we get into that, LOOK AT THAT ALBUM COVER. Larry Graham peeks out from a hot pink, palm-leafed environment, popping his collar and looking like Magnum motherfuckin’ PI. If ever there was an album cover that looked precisely how the album sounds, this is it.
By the release of 1982’s Sooner or Later, Graham was already an elder statesman of funk, having been a member of Sly & The Family Stone, worked with the likes of Betty Davis, fronted his own Graham Central Station, and oh yeah, INVENTED SLAP BASS. Sooner or Later is his foray into the new world of the ’80s, effectively saying, “Here I am, new and improved and ready to slay all the Kingdom Hall pussy.”
This is especially true of the instrumental version of the titular track, which contains some of my favorite tropes of Jheri Curl Music: a talk box vocal that sounds like a horny robot a la Roger Troutman, laser gun noises, and a bright, trilling synth line. This is a song made for cruising on a neon lit street in a Ferrari 308 GTB convertible with the top down on a steamy summer night, the warm air lightly caressing your curl and ruffling your mustache.
Week 1 of Jheri Curl June VIbe comes to a close tomorrow! In the meantime, check out the Spotify and YouTube playlists below.
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”). This year, for our sixth Jheri Curl June, we’re bequeathing that honor on a third group: Cameo, whose 1986 jam “Candy” was part of the very first JCJ way back in 2014.
My pick for this year comes from earlier in the group’s career, but is even more of an essential Jheri Curl cut. “Flirt,” from Cameo’s 1982 album Alligator Woman, has it all: futuristic synths, a funky groove that splits the difference between P-Funk and the Minneapolis Sound, and a music video (above) that is roughly equal parts synchronized dance moves and leering closeups of models’ butts and cleavage. And speaking of leering, you’ll probably recognize the young lady from the Alligator Woman album cover: that’s none other than Denise Matthews, a.k.a. Vanity, star of the 1985 Jheri Curl Cinema classic The Last Dragon.
We’re halfway through our first week of Jheri Curl June VIbe and just getting started! Click through for YouTube and Spotify playlists, and see you tomorrow.