Dystopian Dance Party

Blog

  • Dystopian Listening Party Podcast: The True Meaning of Thanksgiving

    Dystopian Listening Party Podcast: The True Meaning of Thanksgiving

    Last year, Zach wrote that Thanksgiving is about two things: whitewashing the brutal history of colonialism against America’s native peoples, and eating a lot of goddamn food. We took care of the latter topic at the time; so now, we’re turning our attention to the former. This month’s Dystopian Dance Party Podcast is all about the relationship between popular music and Native American culture–an often fraught relationship, as you might imagine, but an endlessly fascinating one nonetheless. Check it out, then check below the jump for a list of the songs played and an accompanying Spotify playlist so you can hear the music without us yapping over it.

    (more…)

    Podcast: Play in new window | Download

  • Dystopian Halloween Party Podcast: Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare

    Dystopian Halloween Party Podcast: Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare

    Well, here it is: coming in two days after Halloween, but better late than never, we have our first-ever podcast. This is something we’ve been talking about doing for a while, and overall it was pretty fun–even if we’re both so unprofessional that it required hours of post-editing to make us listenable. And yes, this being our first attempt, the whole thing is a little rough around the edges, sound quality-wise; but that’s all part of the charm of podcasting, right? …Right?

    Anyway, to launch this new monthly feature, we could think of no better topic of discussion than the 1987 direct-to-video Canadian horror film Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare. Directed by the late John Fasano (Zombie Nightmare, Black Roses, The Jitters) and written by/starring bodybuilder-turned-cult-metal-frontman Jon Mikl Thor, Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare (also known as The Edge of Hell) was made on a shoestring budget and is still remembered today–if at all–for its cheeseball effects and good-natured Canadian butt-rock soundtrack. Needless to say, it’s a favorite of ours, and we take our time discussing everything from the infamous van scene to the absolutely bonkers climax. I hope you enjoy it. Listen below, and check after the jump for a chronological list of the music played and the scenes discussed.

    (more…)

    Podcast: Play in new window | Download

  • Jheri Curl June: Calloway’s “I Wanna Be Rich”

    Well, folks, they say all good things must come to an end, and sadly, that applies to Jheri Curl June as well. But we want to go out on a high note, and so here’s one of my favorite late-period jheri curl tracks: Calloway’s “I Wanna Be Rich.”

    Calloway was of course the solo–or, erm, duo–project of Reggie and Vincent Calloway, founding members of Midnight Star and the brothers who brought us not one, not two, but three separate Jheri Curl June tracks. “I Wanna Be Rich” comes from Calloway’s debut album All the Way, recorded after the brothers left Midnight Star in 1989. Indeed, its songwriting credits betray the fact that it started life as a Star song, written but not recorded in 1983 by the brothers Calloway, Belinda Lipscomb, and Melvin “McArthur” Gentry.

    (more…)

  • Jheri Curl June: The Brothers Johnson’s “Kick it to the Curb”

    Jheri Curl June: The Brothers Johnson’s “Kick it to the Curb”

    1988’s Kickin‘ was an attempted comeback for the Brothers Johnson after a four-year hiatus during which co-founders and real-life brothers George and Louis Johnson pursued solo projects. Unfortunately, the album and singles failed to make a mark on the charts, a far cry from the Brothers’ previous platinum album sales throughout the late ’70s.

    Certainly, Kickin’ does not hold up to the Brothers’ earlier music, such as hits “Strawberry Letter 23,” “I’ll Be Good to You,” and “Stomp!,” yet the album retains the signature cool funkiness of the Brothers Johnson’s sound.

    (more…)

  • 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?”

    (more…)

  • 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.

    (more…)

  • 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.

    (more…)

  • 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.

    (more…)

  • 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.

    (more…)

  • 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.

    (more…)