Dystopian Dance Party

Tag: larry graham

  • Jheri Curl June: Larry Graham’s “Sooner or Later”

    Listen, I have been sitting on this Jheri Jam for a whole year, sustaining multiple burns on my ass from trying to contain this hot track. But, before we get into that, LOOK AT THAT ALBUM COVER. Larry Graham peeks out from a hot pink, palm-leafed environment, popping his collar and looking like Magnum motherfuckin’ PI. If ever there was an album cover that looked precisely how the album sounds, this is it.

    By the release of 1982’s Sooner or Later, Graham was already an elder statesman of funk, having been a member of Sly & The Family Stone, worked with the likes of Betty Davis, fronted his own Graham Central Station, and oh yeah, INVENTED SLAP BASS. Sooner or Later is his foray into the new world of the ’80s, effectively saying, “Here I am, new and improved and ready to slay all the Kingdom Hall pussy.”

    This is especially true of the instrumental version of the titular track, which contains some of my favorite tropes of Jheri Curl Music: a talk box vocal that sounds like a horny robot a la Roger Troutman, laser gun noises, and a bright, trilling synth line. This is a song made for cruising on a neon lit street in a Ferrari 308 GTB convertible with the top down on a steamy summer night, the warm air lightly caressing your curl and ruffling your mustache.

    Week 1 of Jheri Curl June VIbe comes to a close tomorrow! In the meantime, check out the Spotify and YouTube playlists below.

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  • The Prince Issue Podcast with Guest Erika Peterson

    As you may have heard, we recently launched a physical magazine, the first issue of which is dedicated to eclectic art and writing inspired by the music of Prince. So, to celebrate a successful launch–and to get us back in podcasting mode after an unplanned six-month leave of absence–we invited Erika Peterson, a friend and contributor to the magazine, to talk about her work and the most funny/surreal moments of Celebration 2018 at Paisley Park. We also talk about Dystopian Dance Party’s ongoing beef with Questlove, and do our best to try and beat him at his own game of guessing Prince songs from their opening seconds. It doesn’t go well.

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  • Podcast: (Zoloft) Zombie Nightmare

    Oh, hey, remember when we said we would watch the 1987 Jon Mikl Thor sorta-vehicle Zombie Nightmare and discuss it in time for Halloween? Well, here it is, just in time for…Thanksgiving. Yeah, we kinda screwed the pooch on that one, but bear with us, because we also have a lot to share about Zach’s 15 minutes of infamy with Team Breezy, the bizarre public meltdown of actor/model/singer/relationship guru/visual artiste Tyrese Gibson, and the forthcoming debut of Dystopian Dance Party in physical form! Also, we talk about our embarrassing physical and mental health ailments.

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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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