Dystopian Dance Party

Tag: reggie calloway

  • Jheri Curl June: Midnight Star’s “Headlines”

    Over the years, we’ve talked a lot about how Jheri Curl Music evolved over the decade: taking on associated sounds like electro and freestyle, before finally being subsumed by the emergence of New Jack Swing. On the other hand, there’s Midnight Star, who continued to plow more or less the same furrow throughout the whole Jheri Curl era: from their breakthrough in 1983 until the departure of creative nucleus, brothers Reggie and Vincent Calloway, three years later. Listen to 1983’s No Parking on the Dance Floor back to back with 1986’s Headlines and you’d be forgiven for thinking they were recorded during the same sessions: pretty much the only thing that changed, in fact, were the group’s actual J.C.’s, which had blossomed from the relatively modest coiffures of the former to the baroque salon lookbook lineup of the latter.

    But hey, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it; and the title track of Headlines shows that, if nothing else, Midnight Star’s signature sound was still good for a decent groove. If we’ve heard these tricks before–right down to Vincent’s Vocodered rap, which sounds copied and pasted from the No Parking club hit “Freak-A-Zoid“–it’s only because they proved so effective the first time around. Just one word of advice: while “Headlines” hardly necessitates a 12″ mix–the damn album track is already almost eight and a half minutes long–it’s still my preferred version, if only because it contains the hilarious breakdown where singer Melvin Gentry demands we “take a memo” and then spends the next 45 seconds rapping the words “type” and “backspace.” Also, Reggie plays a flute solo. Who knew journalism could be so funky?

    We’ll be back tomorrow with more latter-day Jheri Jams. Meanwhile, check out our growing playlists below!

  • Podcast: Jheri Curl June 2K18

    This year marks our fifth annual Jheri Curl June, and we’re going to make it a thing or die trying. Join us as we define the Jheri Curl Music genre and share our picks for the most essential tracks; then, starting Monday, we’ll formally kick off the month-long celebration of wet, silky ’80s R&B. Oh, and listen all the way to the end, because we also announce the winners of our two free copies of Dystopian Dance Party Issue 1!

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  • Jheri Curl June Special: L.A. Reid

    If you’re a regular Jheri Curl June reader, then you should already know that the first week of June holds special signifance in jheri curl music history. As we noted back in our very first Jheri Curl June Special of 2014, Prince’s birthday falls at the end of the week, on June 7. Just a day earlier, there’s also the birthday of megaproducer and Prince’s fellow Minneapolitan, James “Jimmy Jam” Harris III: the subject, with musical life partner Terry Lewis, of our 2015 JCJ Special. And if all that wasn’t enough, on the very same date as Prince, another Midwestern Jheri Curl architect was born in 1956: Cincinnati, Ohio’s own Antonio “L.A.” Reid.

    With all due respect to Mr. Reid–who, in my defense, has so much money that I sincerely doubt he cares–there’s a reason why we waited three years to enshrine him in the Jheri Curl June Hall of Fame. If, as I suggested last year, Prince was Jheri Curl’s principal architect and Jam and Lewis its most successful engineers, then Reid and his longtime colleague Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds were more like JCM’s property developers, building on the blueprints of the Minneapolis Sound to considerable success without ever really innovating on the formula. When we think about L.A. and Babyface, we think about…well, LaFace, a label synonymous with early ’90s R&B. Their achievements in the previous decade were decidedly more modest.

    But that doesn’t mean they weren’t, in their own way, important. Dystopian Dance Party has love for Reid’s and Edmonds’ early band the Deele, and last year we highlighted one of the pair’s late-era jheri curl productions, “Rock Steady” by the Whispers. There’s plenty of room in pop music for songs that refine and iterate on existing formulas, rather than reinventing the wheel; this is especially true in jheri curl music, a genre that existed pretty much exclusively as a vehicle for up-and-coming artists to bite from Prince and Michael Jackson. This, then, is our tribute to L.A. Reid: maybe not the most innovative of artists, but a shrewd businessman, a talented musician, and a gifted producer and songwriter who could, let’s not forget, buy and sell all of us in a second.

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  • Jheri Curl June: Calloway’s “I Wanna Be Rich”

    Well, folks, they say all good things must come to an end, and sadly, that applies to Jheri Curl June as well. But we want to go out on a high note, and so here’s one of my favorite late-period jheri curl tracks: Calloway’s “I Wanna Be Rich.”

    Calloway was of course the solo–or, erm, duo–project of Reggie and Vincent Calloway, founding members of Midnight Star and the brothers who brought us not one, not two, but three separate Jheri Curl June tracks. “I Wanna Be Rich” comes from Calloway’s debut album All the Way, recorded after the brothers left Midnight Star in 1989. Indeed, its songwriting credits betray the fact that it started life as a Star song, written but not recorded in 1983 by the brothers Calloway, Belinda Lipscomb, and Melvin “McArthur” Gentry.

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  • Jheri Curl June: LeVert’s “Casanova”

    Jheri Curl June: LeVert’s “Casanova”

    Well, here we are: the last full week of Jheri Curl June. Since we try to go in rough chronological order, this is the week when things start to get a little tricky: as we went over last year, the latter half of the ’80s was a period of decline for jheri curl music, as the pop market shifted toward the fresher, more youthful sounds of hip-hop and New Jack Swing. It was not, however, an overnight process; and so the waning years of the decade offer many examples of transitional songs: retaining the DNA of classic jheri curl, while also beginning to show the effects of the emerging R&B mutations of the ’90s.

    “Casanova,” by Cleveland-based vocal group LeVert, is one such transitional song. Its parent album, 1987’s The Big Throwdown, was co-produced by Reggie Calloway: a member of the jheri-curl old guard, who dedicated readers may remember as a performer on Midnight Star‘s “No Parking on the Dance Floor” and a producer on “Meeting in the Ladies’ Room” by Klymaxx. So yes, those drums may have the soon-to-be-patented New Jack swingbeat; but the keyboard frills and clean guitar part are as jheri-curl as Ice Cube’s yearbook photo.

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  • Jheri Curl June: Klymaxx’s “Meeting in the Ladies Room”

    What would Ladies’ Week be without a tribute to Klymaxx: one of the few all-female, self-formed groups in pop music history? Meeting in the Ladies Room, Klymaxx’s fourth studio album, was co-produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis and went platinum with four successful singles, one of which was the title track.

    The song–written by another trio of Jheri Curl June veterans, Reggie and Vincent Calloway and Boaz Watson of Midnight Star (hence the “stealth” “Freak-a-zoid” reference)–opens with Klymaxx singer/drummer Bernadette Cooper muttering about the behavior of the other women in the club who are eyeing her man, while dropping a few subtle hints at her financial status: “I had to leave my condo to come to this / Well, I’m back, but this time I’m with my man / And these women are putting their hands all over his / Yamamoto Kansai sweater that I bought.”

    Granted, the rest of the song is about dolling yourself up in the bathroom to look better than those other women, who are apparently succeeding at rubbing up on your boyfriend. These themes of female competition, beauty as a source of power, and uncontrollable male sexuality do somewhat downplay the concept of a successful woman who can buy her man designer clothes. But can we all agree that it’s pretty progressive just to have a group of women who could play their own instruments, weren’t put together by a Svengali to fit a caricatured male fantasy, and recorded songs about topics relevant to women?

    (P.S. I think it’s worth noting that the pop-arty video above was not only directed by Devo co-founder Gerald Casale, but also featured a young Vivica A. Fox as one of the “BW”s in the club. The more you know.)

    Playlist below the jump; see you next week!

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