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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!
(more…)It’s a poetic fluke of the cosmos that so many Jheri Curl Music innovators’ birthdays fall in June, the genre’s holiest month. So far, we’ve highlighted Prince (June 7), Jimmy Jam (June 6), L.A. Reid (also June 7), and Jesse Johnson (June 1)–as well as Michael Jackson, who passed away on June 25, 2009. Now, on the occasion of his 60th birthday, it’s finally time to induct André Cymone into the JCM Hall of Fame.
As Prince’s earliest musical collaborator, André Cymone played an integral, but regrettably overshadowed part in the creation of the Jheri Curl Music strain more popularly known as the Minneapolis Sound. On our Prince associates podcast from a couple of years ago, I described Cymone as the twin Prince (figuratively, of course) consumed in utero. So many of the more famous artist’s stylistic choices in the first three years of his career–from his embrace of New Wave sounds and fashions to the whole song “Do Me, Baby”–can be more accurately interpreted as a collaborative effort between himself and his one-time surrogate brother. By the time André, understandably fed up with the lack of credit for his work, went solo in early 1981, the persona known as “Prince” had been more or less fully formed; this inevitably did his longtime partner a disservice by making his solo career look like an imitation.
But today we celebrate André Cymone not as an imitator, but as the innovator he was. While he may not have scaled the critical or commercial heights of his musical other half, his efforts–both behind the scenes and in the spotlight–left an indelible mark on Jheri Curl Music, and on the last 30 years of pop and R&B in general.
(more…)We’ve talked a fair amount on this blog about the, ahem, interesting similarities between Rick James’ Mary Jane Girls and Prince’s Vanity 6: a concept James always maintained he came up with first, only for the Paisley Bandit to swoop in and summarily bite it. But if other stories are to be believed, Prince was actually biting from someone much closer to home: his first bass player and one-time surrogate brother, André Cymone.
The rocky relationship between Prince and Cymone is another thing we’ve discussed in Jheri Curl Junes past, and it should be noted that Prince had a history of “borrowing” from his friend and collaborator: “Do Me, Baby,” among other early songs, was by all accounts an André Cymone joint. So it wasn’t exactly a shock to hear that Prince got the idea for a girl group after catching wind of Cymone’s own side project, creatively named “the Girls.” At some point, according to the excellent (and sadly out of print) biography Dance Music Sex Romance, André and Prince even combined their ideas for the group, then known as “the Hookers”; André, however, walked away after realizing that Prince wanted him to do the work without taking any of the credit. And the rest was history: the Hookers became Vanity 6, who became Apollonia 6, and Cymone’s “Girls” released their debut album in 1984, to commercial and critical indifference.
It didn’t take a stroke of genius to come up with the idea for this year’s Jheri Curl June podcast. Rick James may be the most important architect of the genre we call Jheri Curl Music who we hadn’t already commemorated with a long-term feature. He also has a hell of a story: one he told in not one, but two posthumous memoirs–2007’s Confessions of Rick James: Memoirs of a Superfreak and 2014’s Glow–which makes him a perfect candidate for the Dystopian Book Club. A “habitual line-stepper” in both life and art, James was vital in bridging the gap between 1970s P-Funk and 1980s Jheri Curl; his later decline into drug addiction and imprisonment was unfortunate, but could only somewhat dampen his boundless talent and charisma. So join us on this most sacred of occasions as we celebrate Mr. Cold Blooded himself: a man whose artistic potential was the only thing bigger than his larger-than-life personality and appetites. Gimme some ganja!
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The Mary Jane Girls were essentially Rick James’ answer to Vanity 6: the girl group Prince constructed as the prostitute foil to The Time‘s pimp image. In this case, though, Rick James might have actually one-upped his longtime rival; for their 1983 American Bandstand performance of “All Night Long,” the girls look like they were literally picked up off the corner on the way to the studio.
James originally conceived of the Mary Jane Girls project as a solo act for his backup singer, JoJo McDuffie. The other members of the group couldn’t sing: hence why this clip is a lip-synced performance of the studio recording. Check out that choreography, though!
The Spotify playlist continues to grow after the jump: