Dystopian Dance Party

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  • 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: Stacy Lattisaw’s “Jump Into My Life”

    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.

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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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  • 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 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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