Dystopian Dance Party

Tag: prince

  • Our New Sister Site: dance / music / sex / romance

    Just a brief interruption of the Jheri Curl June festivities to note that I’ve launched a new sister site for Dystopian Dance Party on its own domain (princesongs.org). The blog is called dance / music / sex / romance, and is a chronological, song-by-song exploration of the music of Prince: sort of like a much, much bigger version of the Kanye West Oeuvre series, or a more inept version of Chris O’Leary’s chronological David Bowie blog Pushing Ahead of the Dame. I’ll probably occasionally cross-promote Dystopian Dance Party on d / m / s / r and vice versa, but you can also see the latest d / m / s / r posts on the little RSS feed widget toward the bottom of the D.D.P. sidebar. I’ll be updating two times a week or so, hopefully, until the blog is finished or I die, whichever comes first.

    Here’s the first post to whet your appetite. Enjoy.

    Funk Machine: Prehistory, 1963-1968

  • 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: Imaginary Genres – Jheri Curl Music

    It’s finally here! In case you weren’t aware, Jheri Curl June is our most sacred holiday season here at Dystopian Dance Party, and we wanted to do something special for its third annual observance (“Jh3ri Curl Jun3”). So, instead of resurrecting the same hoary old introductory post from 2014, we thought we’d offer a concise introduction to the genre we call Jheri Curl Music in the form of a short video. Please enjoy; transcript and video/audio credits are past the jump. And come back tomorrow for some more traditional Jheri Curl June fare!

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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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  • Dystopian Listening Party Podcast: Prince, 1958-2016

    If it wasn’t official before, it is now: 2016 is a terrible year for musical icons. Callie and I were blindsided by the news of Prince‘s untimely death last Thursday; it hit us even harder than the news of David Bowie‘s passing back in January (and that, as you might recall, hit us pretty damn hard). It’s difficult to overstate just how much Prince means to both of us. He’s easily our favorite solo artist in all of pop music; check our frequently used tags on Dystopian Dance Party, and you’ll see that he’s the most talked-about topic by some distance. All of which fails to adequately capture the feelings we have for his body of work, and the sense of loss we feel now that he’s gone.

    Unlike with Bowie, we weren’t actually planning on podcasting about Prince this month–but we had to, if only so we could talk through all the emotions we’ve both been feeling for the last week. The podcast we originally recorded earlier in the month, on Nintendo‘s Legend of Zelda series, will be posted eventually, when it all feels a little less meaningless. But for now, dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life…

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  • Dystopian Listening Party Podcast: The Gospel According to Rock ‘n’ Roll

    In American popular music, there’s always been a fine line between the sacred and the secular. On this episode of the Dystopian Dance Party podcast, we talk about a few of the songs for which that line is finer than most: nominally “secular” songs with the lyrical and/or stylistic underpinnings of gospel music. Just in time for Easter weekend!

    As always, show notes are below, along with a Spotify playlist for those of you who want to hear the songs without our standard jibber-jabber.

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  • Dystopian Listening Party Podcast: Je Suis Kanye

    Earlier this month, Kanye West (basically) released his seventh solo album, The Life of Pablo. And, since Zach won’t get around to writing about it for a while, we thought we’d dedicate this episode of our podcast to sharing our impressions. It’s a bit of a messy, meandering conversation, but then, that’s only fair when it comes to discussing a messy, meandering (but still great) album like Kanye’s. So join us, a couple of those “no-pussy-gettin’ bloggers” Yeezy loves so dearly, as we discuss The Life of Pablo, the meaning of “conscious” hip-hop in 2016, and why Kanye West matters.

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  • Dystopian New Year’s Party Podcast: Our Favorite Songs of 2015

    Well, here we are, at the cusp of the New Year: that sacred time when bloggers from all over congregate for one last chance to opine about the pop culture year that was. And we’re no exception–even though, as we note in the introduction, we’re barely up for the task, having spent most of 2015 listening to the same Ying Yang Twins records we’d been listening to since 2005. But what is pop-culture blogging, anyway, if not the chance to exercise one’s self-appointed, mostly illusory authority on an unwilling and mostly uncaring audience?

    I originally wanted this inaugural year-in-review podcast to include multiple forms of media, but quite frankly we’re even worse at keeping up with film, television, et. al. than we are at keeping up with music; and besides, seeing as music is 90% of what we write about on Dystopian Dance Party, it kind of makes more sense this way. So here, without further ado, are our favorite songs of 2015. Settle in, because this one’s gonna be even longer and more self-indulgent than usual!

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  • Jheri Curl June: dáKRASH’s “Wasn’t I Good to Ya?”

    Jheri Curl June: dáKRASH’s “Wasn’t I Good to Ya?”

    In one of the first posts for Jheri Curl June this year, Callie talked about how the Minneapolis Sound sprawled out from its chief originator, Prince, to encompass all kinds of solo and side projects by his ex-associates. Today, we close our last full week of the month with one of those side projects: a little-known group called dáKRASH, assembled and produced by the Time‘s Jesse Johnson.

    Johnson was a rare quasi-equal during his stint in the Prince camp; he was, for one thing, the only actual member of the Time to play on the studio tracks for their 1984 album Ice Cream Castle, laying down the classic “sexy solah” for Purple Rain hit “Jungle Love.” So it should come as no surprise that dáKRASH puts a recognizably “Jesse Johnson” spin on their own 1988 slice of Minneapolis jheri curl, “Wasn’t I Good to Ya?”

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  • Jheri Curl Cinema: The Last Dragon (1985)

    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.

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