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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…)Zach and Callie reconvene in (by our standards) record time for another Dystopian Book Club Official Selection: Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard on You? by Parliament–Funkadelic maestro George Clinton. Enjoy as we discuss our love of P-Funk and the book’s disappointing lack of hot deets on the Super Mario Bros. movie.
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Well, here we are: for the second consecutive year, we’re turning Memorial Day weekend into a time of remembrance for the many great artists we lost since last May. But because this is still Dystopian Dance Party, and we’re constitutionally incapable of being reverent for more than a few minutes at a time, please be aware that the resulting podcast is about 70% wake, 30% roast (well, maybe 60/40). Just believe us when we tell you it’s all coming from a place of love. Hopefully, while everyone good continues to die and leave us trapped on this smoldering husk of a planet, we can at least entertain you (and ourselves) with our impressions of “The Force M.D.’s Meet the Fat Boys”… R.I.P. to Trisco Pearson. Show notes below.
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Few artists exemplify the ability of jheri curl music to cross racial boundaries like Dan Hartman. This is a man who started his career as a sideman for the literal whitest musician of all time, Edgar Winter, and went on to co-write and produce for one of the Blackest, James Brown. So it should come as no surprise that he dabbled in that ultimate hybrid genre, Jheri Curl, in-between.
Unlike our previous picks for White Boys’ week, however, Dan Hartman’s take on JCM is truly heterogeneous: roughly one part synthesized pop-soul to two parts classic 1980s butt-rock. If his 1984 hit “We Are the Young” wasn’t on the soundtrack to Miami Vice, the producers really missed a trick; this song is basically Don Johnson set to music.
Tomorrow, sadly, is our last day of Jh3ri Curl Jun3. In the meantime, enjoy the Spotify and YouTube playlists after the jump.
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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