Dystopian Dance Party

Tag: egyptian lover

  • Year of the Weasel, Year Two Episode 10: The Curse of Inferno (1998)

    Year of the Weasel, Year Two Episode 10: The Curse of Inferno (1998)

    Podcast: Play in new window | Download

    Much like the year 2024 itself, we’re taking the Year of the Weasel into 2025 with the mandate “more of the same, but worse”! So in that spirit, here’s Pauly Shore doing some decidedly shaky accent work in a limp Coen Brothers imitation so obscure, we didn’t even know it existed until last November. But wait, don’t leave yet, the score is by legendary session musician Jeff “Skunk” Baxter!

    Video version below:

    00:00:00 Trailer for The Curse of Inferno (John Warren, 1998)

    00:05:04 Not gonna lie, we’d rather be watching this

    00:12:09 Trailer for Raising Arizona (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1987)

    00:15:44 I Got the Hook Up starring Master P (Michael Martin, 1998)

    00:15:47 Repos (Sal Martino and Master P, 2006)

    00:17:04 2Eleven (Derek Scott, 2015)

    00:17:15 Sloppy Seconds (Lisa Brown and Anthony Williams, 2023)

    00:23:17 Major League: Back to the Minors (John Warren, 1998)

    00:25:31 “Freak-a-holic” Official Music Video by the Egyptian Lover

    00:35:01 Tuneland, another random media project where Skunk Baxter showed up in the late ’90s

    00:35:53 More on Shelley Duvall here

    00:37:35 Ah, what might have been

    00:52:10 Follow us on Instagram!

    00:52:20 Follow us on YouTube!

    00:52:41 Email us (heybuuuddy@dystopiandanceparty.com)

    00:53:00 “Reelin’ in the Years” by Steely Dan featuring Skunk Baxter (Live on The Midnight Special, 1973)

  • Jheri Curl June: Whodini’s “The Freaks Come Out at Night”

    Last December, hip-hop pioneer John “Ecstasy” Fletcher passed away at the age of 56; so it seemed long overdue to pay tribute to the group he co-founded, Whodini, with this year’s Jheri Curl June. “Freaks Come Out at Night,” from the group’s seminal 1984 album Escape, is a perfect example of an early hip-hop, electro Jheri Jam, complete with a bouncy synthesized beat and a horny robot talk box.

    Whodini now lives in the hallowed halls of the proverbial Jheri Curl Hall of Fame, in the same wing as the Egyptian Lover and the Jonzun Crew, with Ecstasy’s signature Zorro hat and tiny shorts on display right next to the Egyptian Lover’s leather suit and everyone’s fingerless gloves.

    We’ll be back tomorrow with more Late Era Jheri Curl Music; in the meantime, playlists are below.

  • Jheri Curl June: The Egyptian Lover’s “I Cry (Night After Night)”

    Like yesterday’s spotlight artist the Jonzun Crew, the Egyptian Lover is a pioneer of the Jheri Curl-adjacent hip-hop subgenre electro (or, as they liked to call it on the West Coast, electro-hop). Way back in our first-ever Jheri Curl June, we even called his 1986 club hit “Freak-a-holic” “the ultimate jheri curl track.” And certainly, the Lover himself (a.k.a. Greg Broussard) had one of the most impressive actual J.C.’s of JCJ history, as evidenced by the aforementioned track’s legendary video.

    But Broussard was more than just a mixin’, scratchin’, record-lovin’ son of a gun: he was also a sensitive soul, as evidenced by this slow jam from his 1984 solo debut On the Nile. In a 2016 interview with The Guardian, Broussard shared an unlikely source of inspiration for the song: Rat Pack crooner Dean Martin, specifically his 1969 cover of Buck Owens’ “Crying Time.” To be honest, I don’t hear it–partly because Martin sings the song in his indelible, boozy croon, while the Lover doesn’t “sing” so much as pout along with the music. But let’s face it: “Crying Time” also doesn’t feature a shit-hot guitar solo like the one session guitarist Chuck Gentry plays on “I Cry,” so it’s pretty much a wash.

    Join us again on Monday for Ladies’ Week, our annual celebration of woman-fronted Jheri Curl Music. In the meantime, you can listen to our picks so far on the playlists below.

    https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4DHwfbLgF2W2Xp2ZpqcDdg?si=22e52865759940ab

  • Jheri Curl June: Imagination’s “Just an Illusion”

    As we mentioned in our Jheri Curl June 2K18 podcast, one of our favorite activities here in the Dystopian Dance Party universe is digging in the crates for Jheri Curl Music; and the British JCM group Imagination is my favorite discovery since the Deele.

    © R&B Records

    I picked up their first album, 1981’s Body Talk, solely because of the album cover, which features the trio posed around a white piano, wearing garters and gladiator sandals, in a room shrouded in dry ice smoke.

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  • Jheri Curl June Special: Jesse Johnson

    For the past three years, we’ve commenced our Jheri Curl June festivities with profiles of major figures in the style we call Jheri Curl Music, timed to line up with their birthdays in the beginning of June. In 2014, it was Prince (born June 7); in 2015, it was Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis (the former born June 6); last year, it was L.A. Reid (June 7 again). But until now, we’ve never managed to make time for another architect whose birthday falls as close to the beginning of June as possible: June 1, 1960. I’m talking, of course, about Jesse Johnson.

    Jesse, in our defense, hasn’t exactly been a stranger to Jheri Curl June. His “Be Your Man” was our second-ever JCJ post back in 2014, and we’ve also considered his work both as a member of the Time and as the producer of late-’80s Minneapolis funk-rockers dáKRASH. But we’ve never taken a deep dive into his music–and that’s a damn shame, because whatever Johnson might have lacked in the innovation of his former associates Prince, Jam, and Lewis, he more than made up for with some of the strongest pure Jheri Curl Music of the mid-to-late 1980s. In other words, there’s no better person with whom to launch our fourth annual celebration of all things wet and silky in ’80s R&B music. So let’s get to it!

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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: The Egyptian Lover’s “Freak-a-Holic”

    I’m going on record now to say that the Egyptian Lover‘s “Freak-a-holic” is the ultimate jheri curl track. It has everything you could possibly ask for: a thumping artificial drumbeat, whining bass line, one of the  most unconvincing synthesized horn riffs EVER, and of course a sleazy obsession with sex. In fact, the song is basically a confession from the perspective of someone suffering from sex addiction. Yet the video, in which the Egyptian Lover keeps having hallucinations of lingerie-clad women, makes it seem like he’s just really deprived. Or maybe he just has sex with a lot of imaginary women. Either way, admitting that you have a problem is always the first step, and he seeks help from a Freak-a-Holics Anonymous ad in the Yellow Pages.

    Far from being helpful, however, the Freak-a-Holics Anonymous meeting seems to be a room full of triggers. Behind the cloud of smoke that greets him at the door are all the makings of a wild, freaky party: the same women from his imagination, two keyboardists and a keytar player, choreographed dancers in matching outfits… BALLOONS. I guess the old adage is correct: “Once a freak-a-holic, always a freak-a-holic.”

    See the playlist after the jump…we’ll be back Monday!

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