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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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  • My Type of Hype: A House Party Series Retrospective

    My Type of Hype: A House Party Series Retrospective

    Last month marked the 25th anniversary of the release of House Party: the definitive early ’90s African American teen comedy, starring pop-rappers Kid ‘n Play and directed by Reginald Hudlin. So what better time than now to look back and recall the classic film, the sequels it spawned, and the moment in urban youth culture it inimitably captured and preserved? If you have fond memories of the House Party films, read this post and you just might learn something new–especially about the franchise’s lesser-seen third and fourth installments.

    The original House Party, an expanded remake of a student film Hudlin made while attending Harvard University in 1986, structures itself loosely around a single day in the lives of a group of high school seniors. Peter, a.k.a. “Play” (Christopher “Play” Martin), is throwing the titular house party while his parents are out of town. His friend Christopher, or “Kid” (Christopher “Kid” Reid), wants to use the party as an opportunity to showcase his “dope lyrics” as an M.C., but his plans are jeopardized when he runs afoul of the school bullies: hulking “Stab” and “Zilla” and diminutive, squeaky-voiced “Pee Wee,” played respectively by real-life brothers Paul Anthony, Brian “B-Fine,” and Lucien “Bowlegged Lou” George of the R&B group Full Force. Also attending the festivities are Tisha Campbell as the “bougie” upper-class girl, Sidney, who harbors a crush on Kid; A.J. Johnson as her worldly friend from the projects, Sharane; and Martin Lawrence–in only his second feature film role, after Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989)–as Bilal, the party’s irascible D.J.

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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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  • Jheri Curl June: Roger’s “I Want to Be Your Man”

    Roger Troutman was a talented guitarist, bassist, keyboard player and harmonica player, yet he is undeniably best known for perfecting the use of the talkbox in R&B music. Between his band Zapp and his “solo career”–a term I employ loosely, as most of the personnel on his solo records were in fact members of Zapp–Roger had a string of hits between 1980 and 1983 that helped to put synth-heavy Ohio P-Funk on the map, and made the talkbox a mainstay in jheri curl music.

    By 1983, however, Zapp’s popularity was waning, and Roger began to focus more and more extensively on his solo career.  1987’s “I Want to Be Your Man,” written by Roger’s brother and Zapp percussionist Larry Troutman, reached number three on the Billboard Charts, becoming the most successful hit for either Roger or Zapp.

    The video, which stars Roger’s cropped jheri curl, features Troutman hamming it up for the camera and showing off his ability to play multiple instruments in the best way possible: with a backing band of tiny Roger Troutmen, all on stage at the same time.

    By this time, the talkbox had become less of an element of Roger’s work, both solo and with Zapp, and more of a defining feature. While the use of the talkbox as a lead singer was interesting on such Zapp tracks as “Dance Floor” and “Heartbreaker,” it soon sunk into novelty territory. “I Want to Be Your Man” manages to avoid this fate, at least at first, by being a good R&B song in its own right, with Roger singing a lot of the song in his own tenor. By the end of the song, however, the talkbox becomes an irritatingly tinny soprano that sounds like a very seductive mosquito. Still, it deserves a place in jheri curl history as one of the genre’s best slow jams.

    Two days left of Jheri Curl June…Spotify playlist after the jump!

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  • Jheri Curl June Special: Michael Jackson

    It’s only fitting, as we spend the last full week of Jheri Curl June discussing the twilight years of the genre, that we pay tribute to the man whose passing five years ago today helped spark a revived interest in the music he popularized: Michael Jackson. Though Jackson didn’t play as formative a role in the invention of jheri curl music as his onetime biggest rival, Prince, he damn sure might have perfected it with his string of early-to-mid-’80s crossover hits, both with and without his brothers in the Jacksons. He certainly sported a jheri curl for longer than any of the other artists we’ve discussed so far; posthumously, in fact, if we count his holographic performance at this year’s Billboard Music Awards, making him possibly the first person in history to be outlived by his jheri curl.

    So today, let’s celebrate the life and legacy of jheri curl music’s second most important figure. Just like with Prince, we’ll take a tour through the history of Jackson’s jheri curl music and fashion, and discuss his significance to the genre. Michael may be moonwalking with the angels now, but fortunately for us, his music still lives on.

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  • Jheri Curl June: Was (Not Was)’ “Walk the Dinosaur”

    Is jheri curl music still jheri curl music when it’s self-aware? This is the existential question raised by “Walk the Dinosaur,” the hit 1988 single by Detroit new-wavers Was (Not Was). It has all the ingredients of a great late-period jheri-curl song: clattering synthesized percussion, a bassline that pops all over the place, soulful vocals by singers Harry Bowens and “Sweet Pea” Atkinson. But it’s also coated with the thick layer of ironic detachment that comes with the territory of white art-school types like David and Don Was (born David Weiss and Don Fagenson) interloping in African American culture (see also: Beck, Jack White, Dystopian Dance Party). Indeed, the campy, Flintstones-inspired music video, whose line-dancing cavegirls set off a short-lived late-’80s dance craze, threatens to take the song directly into novelty territory.

    Fortunately, however, the “brothers” Was were both dedicated pastiche artists and certifiable pop-music geeks with a genuine love for the styles they imitated; these are the same guys, after all, who employed P-Funk musicians years before Talking Heads, and sounded more like the real thing in the process. So yes, “Walk the Dinosaur” is both an arch postmodern jest that uses contemporary R&B as a vehicle for ironic visions of nuclear apocalypse, and a goofy novelty dance number; but it’s also, at least as far as I’m concerned, a good-ass song, and a worthy addition to the annals of jheri curl music history. Let’s, uh, just try not to think about that 1993 cover by George Clinton.

    We’ll be back tomorrow with another Jheri Curl June Special about the other titan of jheri curl music. In the meantime, check on that playlist after the jump!

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