Dystopian Dance Party

Tag: whispers

  • Jheri Curl June: Carrie Lucas’ “Men”

    Carrie Lucas began her career as a backup singer for the Whispers before signing to SOLAR Records. While she didn’t have any breakout hits during her solo career, 1982’s Still in Love is a Jheri Curl classic which includes a song produced by Nicholas Caldwell of the Whispers, as well as today’s Jheri Curl June song, “Men.”

    What would Ladies’ Week be without a funky jaunt through the ways that men are absolute trash? “Men” begins with a list of the homekeeping duties and emotional labor that women are expected to do for men, asking, “Is this a woman’s place?” It’s feminism you can dance to!

    We’ll be back tomorrow with more female-fronted Jheri Curl Music. Meanwhile, YouTube and Spotify playlists are below!

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  • Jheri Curl June: The Controllers’ “Stay”

    The first time I heard “Stay” by the Controllers, it was blasting from the speakers of a purple motorcycle driving down Warren Avenue on a sultry late August night in Detroit. The part I heard was about midway through, during the synth solo. My first thought was, “What the FUCK is this?!” Then I realized where it was coming from: a dude with long braids and no helmet riding a PURPLE MOTORCYCLE. Check it out in this creepy video I took of him–because he’s my hero, and also because I forgot that Snapchat has Shazam and I wanted to save the song to find later, even though I could clearly have saved myself a lot of trouble by using the feature that is literally made for finding songs.

    Anyway, eventually I found it and, much like with the Whispers’ “Rock Steady,” I did NOT expect it to be by a group of dorky-looking older guys dancing in unison. But boy, I’m glad it is.

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  • 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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  • Podcast: Brought to You by AnuSol

    Look, people, when we said we were going to talk about whatever we want on the podcast from here on out, we meant what the fuck we said. So this episode, along with the usual discussion about art, old music, and video games, we also swap stories about our past and present butt problems. If you can make it through that, though, we go on to discuss the growing trend of famous sexual predators being aired out, the Halloween-friendly films of Nicolas Cage, and…oh, shit, we also go into way too much detail about that old urban legend with Rod Stewart sucking off a bunch of sailors. Look, this is obviously a ploy for attention, so just give us what we want and listen, okay?

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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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  • 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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  • Jheri Curl June: The Whispers’ “Rock Steady”

    On Tuesday we talked about the Deele, the Ohio-based R&B group that kickstarted the careers of Antonio “L.A.” Reid and Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds. Today we look at one of the songs the duo produced under their production company, Deelesongz, Inc.: the Whispers’ “Rock Steady.”

    The Whispers were formed in 1963 by twins and black Mario Bros. Wallace “Scotty” Scott and Walter Scott, and had several hits throughout the ’60s and ’70s. But “Rock Steady” was their first hit to make it into the Top 10 on the Hot 100, peaking at number 7. I like to think that the success of Rock Steady can be directly attributed to this amazing video:

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