This month’s Headbangers Book Club Official Selection is a special one, as it’s the first book we’ve read that’s not a total sausage party! Pamela Des Barres may not have been a rock star in her own right (unless you count her brief stint in the Zappa-sponsored girl group the GTO’s), but her memoir I’m with the Band is a vital counterpoint to the male-dominated hijinks of ’60s and ’70s rock; plus there’s a couple of real questionable relationships with preteen boys, so it fits right in with our previous selection in even more ways than expected! We’ll be back in a few weeks with Part 2. Thanks for listening!
Turns out Meat Loaf needed a little extra time in the oven, but we’re finally back to discuss the late vocal powerhouse’s 2000 memoir To Hell and Back. Join us as we ponder Meat’s many concussions, his suitably operatic relationship with the also-recently-departed Jim Steinman, and how he’s easily in the top five of anti-maskers we would have been okay catching COVID from. We’ll be back around the middle of next month for a special Jheri Curl June miniseries on Morris Day‘s On Time: A Princely Life in Funk!
I’ve been sitting on this song for the last seven years holding out to see if maybe, just maybe, Vanity’s music would appear on streaming services and we could add it to the Spotify playlist. Unsurprisingly–and, like Eddy Grant‘s absolute fuckin banger “Electric Avenue,” with which we kicked off the festivities this year–that doesn’t seem likely anytime soon. So, I’m finally including Vanity in Jheri Curl June Ladies’ Week (although we did mention her back in 2015 in our Jheri Curl Cinema writeup on The Last Dragon).
“Under the Influence” is my favorite Vanity song. Granted, it was written by Motown songwriters, which is probably why it’s, uh, better than most of her solo stuff (although I love the entire Wild Animal album as well, and will die defending it). Vanity looks stunning in the video, flipping between a glamorous white ’20s-inspired look shot in black and white and some bizarre lacy number with a scarf, two different-colored knee-high boots, and what looks like the pirate hat that I got from the Pirates of the Caribbean gift shop at Disney World back in 2007. Who else BUT Vanity could look that good wearing that stupid outfit and rolling around on the stairs of an opulent hotel entranceway?
We’ll be back with our final day of Ladies’ Week tomorrow. In the meantime, check out the Spotify and YouTube playlists below… just, sadly, don’t expect to see Vanity on the former.
It’s honestly shocking to me that in the six-year run of Jheri Curl June, we’ve never covered Ashford & Simpson, the ultimate soul music couple. Ashford & Simpson are what Jheri Curl June inductees René & Angela aspired to look like: a powerhouse singer-songwriter married couple.
Beginning their careers as successful songwriters, Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson wrote songs for Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles before joining Motown and continuing their trail of hits. But what we’re interested in here at Dystopian Dance Party is the second decade of Ashford & Simpson’s solo career: specifically, 1984’s Solid, when the couple went and got proverbial Jheri curls together.
Solid could be classified as a Jheri Curl album for the grown and sexy. Unlike most Jheri Curl Music that’s for the club or en route to the club, this is the album you put on when you’re about to pour champagne and have slow, sensual sex on satin sheets. It’s not spontaneous humpin’, this shit was planned out all week and you’re about to make this baby because it’s a Friday night AND the peak day of ovulation. Babies aren’t made in heaven, after all.
Anyway, let’s say you’ve poured out the champagne out and have been kissing and touching and all that, right? “Outta the World” is undressing and foreplay music. Things are getting steamy and wet now–you know, kind of like a Jheri curl. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: at its best, Jheri Curl Music sounds like the wetness of desire AND/OR the literal feel of a Jheri curl, and “Outta the World” is a perfect example of this. Now check out Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson’s sweet synchronized shoulder shrugs and get humpin’.
And with that, we’ll just leave you to start your weekend with the words “Ashford & Simpson” and “humpin’” emblazoned in your brain. Or, you can listen to the playlists below and try to clear your mind.
Danny Brown put me up on Stacy Lattisaw. After hearing him reference her in “Adderall Admiral” and gush about her in his Nardwuar interview (beginning at 5:45 in the video below), I made a point of checking her out and, lo and behold, she is a perfect fit for Jheri Curl June.
Lattisaw’s most commercially successful period was during her teenage years. By 1986, now only 20 years old, she had signed to Motown and released Take Me All the Way. The album was produced by Kashif and Leon Sylvers III of SOLAR Records, which definitely explains the Jheri Curl sound. “Jump Into My Life,” the second single off the album, is definitely full of late-period Jheri Curl flair with its rhythmic bass and layered synthesizers.
Every year there’s at least one artist who I eagerly anticipate writing about for Jheri Curl June. This year, without question, that artist is Georgio. I already told the story on our latest podcast about the first time I encountered Georgio, flipping through the racks at my local record store (shout out to Purple Narwhal Records in Rockville, Maryland). I took one look at the sculpted cheekbones and tastefully-applied makeup on the cover of his 12″ single “Tina Cherry,” and somehow I knew that this would be my JCJ discovery of 2018. I promptly picked up not only “Tina Cherry,” but the whole stack of Georgio records, and took them to the counter.
Since then, I’ve made it a habit of picking up whatever Georgio I can find at the record store–I got a copy of “Lover’s Lane,” another single from his 1987 debut, from Electric Fetus in Minneapolis this April. The thing about Georgio I should establish at this point is that his music isn’t great. It’s perfectly competent, on the club/house-ier side of the late-decade JCM spectrum, but there’s a reason why it’s usually priced so cheap that I can routinely afford to walk out with a stack of five or six of his records. My affection for Georgio has a lot to do with my conviction that the best Jheri Curl Music, or at least the most characteristic, is often the most mediocre. It also has to do with the tragicomic history of the man himself, Georgio Allentini.
Penny Ford (a.k.a. Pennye Ford, for reasons unknown) began her musical career as a backup singer for Zapp in 1979 and went on to become a session singer at Motown in Los Angeles before signing to Total Experience Records, home of Gap Band and Yarbrough & Peoples. So, needless to say, her Jheri Curl credentials were set when she embarked on her solo career in 1984. But, holy shit people… not even a résumé like that could prepare us for this video:
If anyone ever asks me what Jheri Curl June is all about, this is the video I will show them. The mirrors, the outfits, Penny’s unfaithful boyfriend is a blatant ripoff of the Kid in Purple Rain... But, most importantly, look at this fucking curl.
Just like we do every year, we’re dedicating one week this month to the women of Jheri Curl Music–see you tomorrow for more JCJ Ladies’ Week! Playlists below.
It didn’t take a stroke of genius to come up with the idea for this year’s Jheri Curl Junepodcast. Rick James may be the most important architect of the genre we call Jheri Curl Music who we hadn’t already commemorated with a long-term feature. He also has a hell of a story: one he told in not one, but two posthumous memoirs–2007’s Confessions of Rick James: Memoirs of a Superfreak and 2014’s Glow–which makes him a perfect candidate for the Dystopian Book Club. A “habitual line-stepper” in both life and art, James was vital in bridging the gap between 1970s P-Funk and 1980s Jheri Curl; his later decline into drug addiction and imprisonment was unfortunate, but could only somewhat dampen his boundless talent and charisma. So join us on this most sacred of occasions as we celebrate Mr. Cold Blooded himself: a man whose artistic potential was the only thing bigger than his larger-than-life personality and appetites. Gimme some ganja!
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.
