Introduction to Jheri Curl June

Ola Ray in a 1980 commercial for "Classy Curl"; photo stolen from the Huffington Post

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a new form of predominantly African American popular music began to take shape. Rooted in soul and funk music, but largely stripped of those genres' grit; with elements of rock and disco, and at least one eye forever resting on potential radio play; the loosely-defined style has gone by a variety of names, including post-disco, pop/funk, and the maddeningly nondescript "urban." But Callie and I have always preferred to call it "jheri curl music."

Jheri curl music is not necessarily music made by artists sporting the once-trendy hairstyle invented by hairdresser Robert William "Jheri" Redding--though obviously there is a good amount of overlap. Instead, we see it as music that embodies the properties of the jheri curl itself. Jheri curl, whether the hair or the music, is an intrinsically hybrid style: somewhere between Black and white, kinky and straight, silky and dry. It's fussy and high-maintenance. And, like the Jheri curl parody "Soul Glo" in John Landis' 1988 comedy Coming to America, it leaves a greasy residue on everything it touches. Not all R&B from the early to mid-'80s qualifies as jheri curl; but when you hear that telltale sign--usually a particular kind of muted guitar, clean slapped bass, or synthesizer squeal--you will recognize it instantly for what it is.

Throwback Thursday: Prince's "Black Sweat"

© NPG Records

Editor's Note: I have been writing about music off and on (mostly off) for almost ten years now. A lot of the stuff I've written has been lost because I was dumb about preserving my work offline. A lot of it is scattered around now-defunct blogs that I'd just as soon not draw any attention to, because they're terrible. But some of it I still think is worth reading, so every once in a while I will throw it onto Dystopian Dance Party with minor revisions. I will do this on Thursdays, because the Internet has officially deemed Thursday the day to share old stuff nobody else cares about. This week, to tie in to all the Prince coverage we've been doing, I'm sharing a review of another Prince single from way back in 2006. - Z.H.

In the summer of 2004, I saw Prince on two of his stops at the Palace of Auburn Hills (now DTE Energy Music Theatre) in metro Detroit. He was touring in support of his much-vaunted "comeback" album, Musicology, and the setlist was tooled to match that record's mood: heavy on hits, often in medley form, with few idiosyncrasies and a "family-friendly" veneer on even the notorious '80s material. Hence when performing "I Feel For You," Prince changed the words "it's mainly a physical thing" to "it's mainly a spiritual thing," while "D.M.S.R."'s 1982 instruction to "work your body like a whore" was replaced with the more modest "work it like you want some more." And it was good, for what it was; the man is pushing 50, after all, and after all those rumors about door-to-door Witnessing, it’s a wonder we got to hear nuggets like "Automatic" and "Let’s Work" in the first place. I mean, what were you expecting? Assless pants?

But on the second night, something strange happened. Prince was midway through a fiery blues guitar solo in "The Question of U" when he threw his axe to the ground. Then, suddenly, he was on the ground too, crawling slowly toward the fallen guitar like he'd just stepped out of the video for "When Doves Cry." Time seemed to stop. Would he stand up? Or would he start humping things? In short, were we about to witness the return of the "old" Prince, the sexy Prince, the Prince all of us in the audience really wished was in Auburn Hills that evening? I had a mental image of the Kid's impish grin as he grinded the hell out of "Darling Nikki" in Purple Rain, stripped to the waist and dripping with sweat. For a moment I saw Jehovah himself, the lips beneath his gray beard curled with shock, his eyes covered piously against the sacrilege to come. It was a surreal, intense, thrilling moment…and then, it was over. Prince stood back up. He finished his show with consummately performed, if safe, renditions of hits like "Kiss" and oldies like Sam & Dave's "Soul Man." He came back with an encore of Musicology's sweet, gorgeous--but hardly Dirty Mind-ed--"Call My Name." And he left, his last show in the Detroit area concluded and not another flash of the Prince we once loved. It was good…for what it was.

Prince: "The Breakdown" and the Problem of Expectations

© Warner Bros. Entertainment

The problem with being an artist like Prince--an artist who built his career on a body of work that was epochal, genre-shattering, indeed genre-defining--is that it's impossible to simply grow old gracefully. For the last three decades (this year of course marking the thirtieth anniversary of his most beloved album, 1984's Purple Rain), Prince has strained increasingly under the weight of expectation created by his own genius. Back in 1994, when disputes with parent label Warner Bros. over the release of The Gold Experience infamously prompted him to brand himself a "slave" and wage war on his own public image, the artist then "Formerly Known as" Prince tried to manage expectations by defying them. By 2004, with the release of "comeback" album Musicology and a massive stadium tour with a setlist slanted toward his past hits, his strategy had reversed entirely: he would meet those expectations head-on, exceeding them in the process. The story of the last ten years has ultimately been the story of the impossibility of that task. Sure, Prince in the 21st century has risen on the strength of Gen-X nostalgia and a series of spectacular live engagements to the highest cultural profile he's had since the beginning of the '90s; but during the exact same period, his new music has sunk further and further into irrelevancy. The wave of excitement that greeted Musicology had, by 2009's obnoxiously-titled LOtUSFLOW3R/MPLSoUND, diminished to a mildly enthusiastic and mostly obligatory trickle. His next and most recent album, 20Ten, didn't even see an official release in the United States.

The latest chapter of this story, I am sorry to say, doesn't do much to alter the narrative arc. Last week, Prince announced a global licensing partnership with old label Warner Bros. that will include both a series of reissues of his classic albums and a brand new, Warner-distributed Prince record. Then, within hours of the announcement, Prince--no doubt aware by this point in his career that the reissue project would be greeted with more enthusiasm than the prospect of new material--dropped the first single from the still-untitled album, "The Breakdown." And it's...definitely a 21st-century Prince song.

4 His Royal Badness's Consideration: 14 Rarities That Need to Be on the 30th Anniversary Purple Rain Reissue

© Warner Bros. Entertainment

Let me begin by doing away with any pretense of critical distance or objectivity. I am an unapologetic, frothing-at-the-mouth, dyed-in-the-pink-cashmere Prince fan. My little two-bedroom apartment has no fewer than four pieces of framed Prince-related art--including the fold-out shower poster from the original 1981 Controversy LP, which I have hanging in the bathroom across from my actual shower. So when I heard late last week that Prince was burying the hatchet with Warner Bros., the label under which he released all of his best work, and planning a series of expanded reissues beginning with 1984's Purple Rain, I reacted pretty much the way you might expect: with sheer, unbridled, childlike glee.

But I'm also a realist. There's a reason why I am this damn excited about a reissue project: a record-industry practice that has become so habitual for virtually every other catalogue artist of note that it's now officially tedious. Because Prince isn't a normal catalogue artist. This, after all, is the guy who stuffed his long-promised 1998 outtakes collection Crystal Ball with a bunch of patently inessential remixes of '90s-era album cuts like "The Continental." This is the guy who, as recently as 2006, made Warner revise the track list of the hits/rarities collection Ultimate Prince to remove the 12" version of "Erotic City" because, presumably, it had naughty words. So as thrilled as I am to see his catalogue maybe finally getting the, ahem, royal treatment it deserves, I still feel the need to accompany my initial reaction of fist-pumping ecstasy with that second of totally natural fan responses: a list of demands.