Dystopian Dance Party

Tag: change

  • Jheri Curl June: The B.B. & Q. Band’s “(I’m a) Dreamer”

    Probably the best thing about having a girlfriend whose mother is Black and lived through the 1980s is that I’m never short on jheri curl music recommendations. Just last week, in fact, Kia (via her mom) hipped me to a track I’d never heard before: the très-jheri 1986 single “(I’m a) Dreamer” by Italo-post-disco act the B.B. & Q. Band.

    “B.B. & Q.” stands for “Brooklyn, Bronx, and Queens,” but to be fair there probably should have been an extra “B.” in there–for Bologna, Italy, the home base of Franco-Italian svengali Jacques Petrus, who assembled the “band” from a crew of New York-based singers and session musicians to follow up on the success of his previous, Luther Vandross-fronted studio project, Change. In the U.S., at least, the B.B. & Q. Band never quite reached the heights of their predecessor; but “Dreamer” did hit #35 on the U.K. charts, and its parent album, 1985’s Genie, helped launch the career of then-lead singer Curtis Hairston.

    Unfortunately, however, it didn’t last: the B.B. & Q. Band dissolved in the most bizarre way possible in 1987, when Petrus was murdered under mysterious circumstances while on the run from tax evasion charges in the French West Indies. Somewhere, though, there’s a Tarantinoesque crime movie waiting to be made out of the life and death of Jacques Petrus. And fortunately, thanks to tracks like “Dreamer,” its soundtrack will be perfect.

    Listen to “Dreamer,” and the rest of our Jh3ri Curl Jun3 selections thus far, on the Spotify and YouTube playlists below:

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  • Jheri Curl June Special: Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis

    The main reason we celebrate Jheri Curl June in June is because, let’s face it, we are only human, and are as susceptible to the siren song of alliteration as the next group of hack Internet writers. But there’s also a pretty good justification for the timing, because the birthdays of two of jheri curl music’s most important innovators fall in the first week of June. We covered the first of those innovators, Prince, in last year’s inaugural Jheri Curl June Special.  So this time around, we’ll be discussing the other one: James “Jimmy Jam” Harris, born June 6, 1959.

    If Prince was jheri curl music’s architect, then Jimmy Jam and his longtime musical partner Terry Lewis were the brilliant engineers who shaped the structure to its fullest potential. Their take on the “Minneapolis Sound” developed by their former mentor added a new level of polish and sophistication; and when Prince shifted his own music away from traditional jheri-curl and toward neo-psychedelia in the mid-’80s, Jam and Lewis went in the opposite direction, crafting ever-more-flawless pop-friendly tracks that kept JCM in the top of the charts and, ultimately, evolved into the next dominant R&B sound, New Jack Swing.

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