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It’s a special #jhericurljune installment of the ol’ Book Club as we dig into 2019’s On Time: A Princely Life in Funk by Morris Day with David Ritz–so, slightly less headbanging than normal, but don’t worry, there’s plenty of the important stuff (i.e., cocaine). We’ll be back in a couple of weeks with Part 2, at which point we’ll also announce our official HBC selection for July. Remember, don’t let us Meat Loaf!
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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.
Jheri Curl June is, of course, first and foremost about the music. But, as I wrote in this year’s introductory post, jheri curl is also a profoundly visual form; it is, after all, the only genre of music to my knowledge named after a hairstyle. And so it only makes sense that we should also take some of the imagery associated with the music into consideration. That’s why this year, I’m happy to announce an entirely new feature dedicated to Jheri Curl Cinema. And there’s no other film more qualified to launch such a feature than Prince’s and Albert Magnoli’s 1984 cult classic Purple Rain.
There are a few reasons why Purple Rain is so perfect for our inaugural Jheri Curl Cinema post. First, yesterday was of course Prince‘s 57th birthday–and while His Royal Badness presumably hasn’t celebrated his birthday since he became a Jehovah’s Witness in 2001, that just means we have to celebrate it twice as hard. But second, and more to the point, Purple Rain is an important film because it captures the essence of the Minneapolis scene in the early 1980s–and thus, by extension, the essence of jheri curl music itself.