I’ve been sitting on this song for the last seven years holding out to see if maybe, just maybe, Vanity’s music would appear on streaming services and we could add it to the Spotify playlist. Unsurprisingly–and, like Eddy Grant‘s absolute fuckin banger “Electric Avenue,” with which we kicked off the festivities this year–that doesn’t seem likely anytime soon. So, I’m finally including Vanity in Jheri Curl June Ladies’ Week (although we did mention her back in 2015 in our Jheri Curl Cinema writeup on The Last Dragon).
“Under the Influence” is my favorite Vanity song. Granted, it was written by Motown songwriters, which is probably why it’s, uh, better than most of her solo stuff (although I love the entire Wild Animal album as well, and will die defending it). Vanity looks stunning in the video, flipping between a glamorous white ’20s-inspired look shot in black and white and some bizarre lacy number with a scarf, two different-colored knee-high boots, and what looks like the pirate hat that I got from the Pirates of the Caribbean gift shop at Disney World back in 2007. Who else BUT Vanity could look that good wearing that stupid outfit and rolling around on the stairs of an opulent hotel entranceway?
We’ll be back with our final day of Ladies’ Week tomorrow. In the meantime, check out the Spotify and YouTube playlists below… just, sadly, don’t expect to see Vanity on the former.
So, let’s begin with the elephant in the room. As you might recall, last year the month of June began mere days after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which made the idea of a semi-irreverent celebration of dated Black music and hairstyles by two privileged White people feel… tone-deaf, to say the least. It was also, of course, less than three months into a once-in-a-lifetime (knock on wood) global pandemic… long story short, we just weren’t in a party mood. But now it’s a year later; and, while the copsstillhaven’tstopped killing Black people–nor, despite what our respective homestates‘ governors apparently think, is the pandemic over–I think we could all use the mood lift that only the smoothest, silkiest ’80s R&B can provide.
For those of you who are new here (or just need a refresher), “Jheri Curl Music” is our name for a specific brand of glossy, heavily synthesized post-disco R&B music from the early-to-mid ’80s–it’s kind of like our yacht rock, except not even 1% as successful or widely recognized. For details, see our original introduction post from 2014, our 2016 video, or our 2018 podcast. We dedicate each June to celebrating this unsung art form: mostly because “Jheri Curl” and “June” are nicely alliterative, but also because early summer is the perfect time to roll down your windows, let the wind blow through your hair (or, if you’re rocking a J.C. yourself, let it blow kind of against and around your hair), and blast some vintage J.C.M.
This year’s Jheri Curl June is a back-to-basics move for us. There will be no long-form artist/producer retrospectives (like we did for Prince, Michael Jackson, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, L.A. Reid, Jesse Johnson, and André Cymone), no Jheri Curl Cinema features (like we did for Purple Rain, The Last Dragon, Moonwalker, and Coming to America), and no special podcast episodes; just a J.C.M. song every weekday for the whole month, with Spotify and YouTube playlists for your listening pleasure. Still, that doesn’t mean we can’t spend our seventh year stretching the boundaries of what belongs under the J.C.M.-brella. That’s why this year, I’m kicking things off with a possibly controversial choice: Eddy Grant’s 1982 reggae-funk hit “Electric Avenue.”
On the surface, reggae and Jheri Curl Music don’t appear to have much in common, aside from their general origins in the African musical diaspora. Hell, just look at each respective genre’s trademark hairstyle: Jheri curls, as has been well established, are glossy and determinedly non-kinky; meanwhile, Rastafari locs (a.k.a. “dreadlocks”) embrace the organic textures of African hair types. Jheri curls have a well-earned reputation for being synthetic and potentially damaging to Black people’s hair follicles (not to mention their furniture), while locs are (rightfully) celebrated as a “natural” hairstyle and an expression of pan-African pride.
And yet, “Electric Avenue” is proof that even styles as diametrically opposed as these can exist in harmony. Oh, sure, Eddy Grant probably wouldn’t have been caught dead with activator in his hair; but who needs an actual Jheri curl when your keyboards are as moist and juicy as the ones on “Electric Avenue”? Meanwhile, Grant’s lyrics–a righteously angry ode to the 1981 uprisings against racist policing and systemic poverty in Brixton, South London–show that Jheri Curl Music, like reggae, can have a political point of view. As far as this writer is concerned, “Electric Avenue” belongs right next to Paul Laurence‘s “Racism!!!” on any self-respecting J.C.M. protest mix.
Speaking of mixes, below you’ll find Spotify and YouTube playlists for this month’s festivities, which we’ll update with every new track. Unfortunately, the Spotify list is currently empty, as “Electric Avenue” does not appear to be available on the service. We can’t blame Eddy Grant, if this was his choice: a banger like this is worth a lot more than the fraction of a cent a Spotify stream earns. But I think we can all agree that our playlists are a little bit weaker for its absence. See you tomorrow!
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.
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.