Dystopian Dance Party

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  • Jheri Curl June: Ebonee Webb’s “Something About You”

    If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Prince must have flattered as hell by Memphis, Tennessee’s Ebonee Webb. Obviously, more than one artist of the jheri-curl persuasion has made a career out of jacking His Royal Badness’ high-heeled swagger, but this 1981 gem is truly uncanny: from the main riff–a straight rip of the Purple One’s “Head“–to the breathy, fey falsetto of singer Michael Winston, to the brief synthesizer breakdown around the three-minute mark, which sounds painstakingly recreated from a similar moment in “Uptown.” Still, the wheel of artistic theft is ever-turning, and soon a new generation of artists were biting from Ebonee Webb: like electro-hop DJ/rapper–and fellow Jheri Curl June alum—the Egyptian Lover, who later admitted to copping his own heavy-breathing schtick from, you guessed it, “Something About You.”

    And besides, why cast aspersions? Ebonee Webb may not have been the most original group out there, but “Something About You” remains a stone-cold groove–a perfect slice of Minneapolis-via-Memphis lite-funk that is all the more attractive in the wake of Prince’s passing. Prince may have been a one-of-a-kind artist, and his absence still stings; but in a strange way, it’s almost comforting to know how thoroughly his groundbreaking style was looted, even less than a year after the release of Dirty Mind. Like Felix da Housecat once said, “We All Wanna Be Prince“;  Ebonee Webb just happened to want it more than most.

    Listen to “Something About You” on our Spotify and YouTube playlists after the jump:

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  • Jheri Curl June: Skyy’s “Call Me”

    The Brooklyn-based funk/boogie octet Skyy formed in the mid-1970s and had three albums under their belt–each titled with a play on the band’s name–before their fourth album, Skyy Line, was released in 1981. “Call Me,” their biggest hit on the album, helped it reach gold status in the U.S., and continues to be a mainstay R&B radio. I hear this one in 105.9 KISS’ Friday Old School Mix Show every week without fail. It’s clear to see why; “Call Me” is one of those great songs from the early ’80s transition period between disco and full-blown Jheri Curl that includes all the best facets of both genres: chicken-scratch guitar, slick keyboards, a triangle enunciating each word in the chorus, hell, even a spoken word portion.

    The video is a classic, too, with Skyy’s trio of frontwomen the Dunning Sisters (Denise, Bonnie, and Delores) providing very clear “picking up the phone” gestures just in case you were confused about the whole “call me” part.

    Spotify and YouTube playlists after the jump!

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  • Jheri Curl June: Imaginary Genres – Jheri Curl Music

    It’s finally here! In case you weren’t aware, Jheri Curl June is our most sacred holiday season here at Dystopian Dance Party, and we wanted to do something special for its third annual observance (“Jh3ri Curl Jun3”). So, instead of resurrecting the same hoary old introductory post from 2014, we thought we’d offer a concise introduction to the genre we call Jheri Curl Music in the form of a short video. Please enjoy; transcript and video/audio credits are past the jump. And come back tomorrow for some more traditional Jheri Curl June fare!

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  • Dystopian Listening Party Podcast: Memorial Day, 2015-2016

    With every passing week, 2016 feels more and more like a never-ending, real-life Grammy Awards tribute montage. We couldn’t even go the six days between recording and posting the podcast without losing another pop music icon: this time, Marshall Jones of the Ohio Players, word of whose death regrettably reached us only after we had finished editing. Clearly, this is a trying time to be a music fan. And, as I’ve found myself saying more than a few times in the past several months, the sheer volume of notable musicians’ deaths starts to feel overwhelming to a small site like ours. I’m not a full-time obituary writer, so even many worthy artists who passed away have inevitably gone unmemorialized.

    That’s why, in the spirit of the real Memorial Day holiday, we’re taking the time to commemorate those the music world has lost since last May. Unfortunately, this will almost certainly be a recurring feature: the cruel realities of the human lifespan, combined with the generational ebb and flow of American popular music, means that things are only going to get worse in the coming years. And sadly, even this tribute isn’t truly exhaustive–even aside from the aforementioned omission of Marshall Jones, we’re only really talking about musicians of whom we have some miniscule level of knowledge, so plenty of important people are still going unmourned (at least by us).  But we did our best, and we at least tried to do everyone justice. Here’s hoping we get a break, at least for a couple more weeks.

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  • Dystopian Video Game Party Podcast: 30 Years of Zelda

    As some of our geekier listeners may already know (oh, who am I kidding, all of our listeners are “geekier”), 2016 marks the 30th anniversary of Nintendo‘s Legend of Zelda series. We wanted to mark the occasion with a podcast, which we did in mid-April–but then Prince died, and the original podcast we recorded went back on the shelf. We’re posting it now for the most inauspicious of reasons: Nintendo has announced that the next Zelda game will be the focus of their presentation at the Electronic Entertainment Expo next month, so a lot of the stuff we say in the last ten minutes or so will be out of date soon (in fact, some of it already is–at one point I say that the game is “almost definitely” coming by the end of the year, when in fact we now know that it’s been pushed back to 2017).

    All that aside, however, I’m glad we took the time to talk about the Zelda games. As I say at the beginning of the podcast, this is one of the few video game series that I will consistently drop everything to play; depending on what we see at E3, it may even be the series that convinces me to buy Nintendo’s next console. A lot has changed, in video games and in life, since 1986; but for us, at least, The Legend of Zelda has maintained its luster. So join us as we share our (sometimes hazy) memories of the series–and check below the jump for notes to explain what the hell we’re talking about.

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  • Dystopian Listening Party Podcast: Prince, 1958-2016

    If it wasn’t official before, it is now: 2016 is a terrible year for musical icons. Callie and I were blindsided by the news of Prince‘s untimely death last Thursday; it hit us even harder than the news of David Bowie‘s passing back in January (and that, as you might recall, hit us pretty damn hard). It’s difficult to overstate just how much Prince means to both of us. He’s easily our favorite solo artist in all of pop music; check our frequently used tags on Dystopian Dance Party, and you’ll see that he’s the most talked-about topic by some distance. All of which fails to adequately capture the feelings we have for his body of work, and the sense of loss we feel now that he’s gone.

    Unlike with Bowie, we weren’t actually planning on podcasting about Prince this month–but we had to, if only so we could talk through all the emotions we’ve both been feeling for the last week. The podcast we originally recorded earlier in the month, on Nintendo‘s Legend of Zelda series, will be posted eventually, when it all feels a little less meaningless. But for now, dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life…

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  • Dystopian Listening Party Podcast: The Gospel According to Rock ‘n’ Roll

    In American popular music, there’s always been a fine line between the sacred and the secular. On this episode of the Dystopian Dance Party podcast, we talk about a few of the songs for which that line is finer than most: nominally “secular” songs with the lyrical and/or stylistic underpinnings of gospel music. Just in time for Easter weekend!

    As always, show notes are below, along with a Spotify playlist for those of you who want to hear the songs without our standard jibber-jabber.

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  • Dystopian Listening Party Podcast: Je Suis Kanye

    Earlier this month, Kanye West (basically) released his seventh solo album, The Life of Pablo. And, since Zach won’t get around to writing about it for a while, we thought we’d dedicate this episode of our podcast to sharing our impressions. It’s a bit of a messy, meandering conversation, but then, that’s only fair when it comes to discussing a messy, meandering (but still great) album like Kanye’s. So join us, a couple of those “no-pussy-gettin’ bloggers” Yeezy loves so dearly, as we discuss The Life of Pablo, the meaning of “conscious” hip-hop in 2016, and why Kanye West matters.

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  • Dystopian Listening Party Podcast: David Bowie, 1947-2016

    Last week, we decided that our next podcast would be devoted to one of our mutual favorite artists, David Bowie, in celebration of his 69th birthday and the release of his 25th studio album, ★: sort of a more personal companion piece to the career-spanning Bowie guide we published that Friday. We didn’t expect to be recording an elegy.

    Early Monday morning, however, we got the sad news that Bowie was no longer with us. That news irrevocably changed the tone of our tribute, which we recorded on Tuesday night. But it isn’t all solemn mourning (though one of us does cry at one point–no spoilers which one). Instead, the following is a personal reflection on the many ways in which pop music–that tawdry, cheap, commercial entertainment–can shape, and even irrevocably change our lives, through the prism of an entertainer who did just that for both us. We hope you enjoy it!

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  • Dystopian New Year’s Party Podcast: Our Favorite Songs of 2015

    Well, here we are, at the cusp of the New Year: that sacred time when bloggers from all over congregate for one last chance to opine about the pop culture year that was. And we’re no exception–even though, as we note in the introduction, we’re barely up for the task, having spent most of 2015 listening to the same Ying Yang Twins records we’d been listening to since 2005. But what is pop-culture blogging, anyway, if not the chance to exercise one’s self-appointed, mostly illusory authority on an unwilling and mostly uncaring audience?

    I originally wanted this inaugural year-in-review podcast to include multiple forms of media, but quite frankly we’re even worse at keeping up with film, television, et. al. than we are at keeping up with music; and besides, seeing as music is 90% of what we write about on Dystopian Dance Party, it kind of makes more sense this way. So here, without further ado, are our favorite songs of 2015. Settle in, because this one’s gonna be even longer and more self-indulgent than usual!

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