Dystopian Dance Party is Now a .com

If you're reading this and wondering why I suddenly disappeared less than a week into Jheri Curl June, it's because this address isn't updated anymore. Please fulfill all your Dystopian Dance Party needs at http://www.dystopiandanceparty.com/. Or don't. I don't care.

Jheri Curl June: Midnight Star's "No Parking on the Dance Floor"

Today's Jheri Curl June entry is the title track from Midnight Star's 1983 album No Parking on the Dance Floor. It has all the necessary ingredients of a classic jheri-curl track: a squealing synth line, bass that pops like crazy, and a camp-as-hell introduction that threatens, "if you don't get a move on that body, I'll be forced to give you a ticket--so get...WITH IT!" Plus, impossible as it might sound, the video is even better:

It's one of those great '80s videos that take the concept of the song and make it blissfully, absurdly literal. So a traffic jam turns into an impromptu dance party, with the nine members of Midnight Star--whose own spectrum of jheri-curl lengths and shapes is right up there with that of Jesse Johnson's Revue--serving as funky pied pipers, leading frustrated drivers to step out of their cars and join the fun. Then, at 1:35...is that...is that Prince? Well, no, of course not, though they sure took pains to make it look that way. But this is one party that doesn't even need a random breakdancing Prince-alike to make it awesome. Midnight Star, I'll get stuck in traffic with you any time.

Check out the Jheri Curl June Spotify playlist after the jump!

Jheri Curl June: Jesse Johnson's "Be Your Man"

Jesse Johnson's birthday was Sunday, so this is a little bit of a belated birthday tribute. "Be Your Man," from Jesse Johnson's 1985 debut solo album Jesse Johnson's Revue, is quintessential Minneapolis jheri curl funk: the pounding drum machine beat, heavy bassline, glossy synth "horns" (which he calls out in a James Brown-esque band leader style), and of course, the tiny funky guitar noodling.

The video showcases Jesse as basically the dark-skinned, pink version of Prince. Plus, together Jesse Johnson's group exhibit six variations of jheri curl shapes:

Check back tomorrow for another song, and remember to follow along with the Jheri Curl June Spotify playlist (after the jump).

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.

Dystopian Road Mix Vol. 1: Kansas City to Eastern Michigan

Editor's Note: If you've read anything at all on this blog, it should already be abundantly clear that I am a big ol' geek. As such, one of my favorite things to do whenever I take a road trip is listen to music by artists from the cities I'm passing through. Now, as it happens, today I will be driving from my current home in Kansas City, Missouri to my parents' house in Port Huron, Michigan; and next month, I'll be taking a second trip from Port Huron to my future home in the Washington, D.C. area. So I figured, since I like making mixes, and since this blog is just a giant vanity project anyway, why not turn my music-geek road trip game into a recurring feature?

I'm calling the feature Dystopian Road Mix. Similar to the previously-introduced Dystopian Dance Mix, it will be a Spotify playlist accompanied by my trademark reams of text. There will be two differences, though (other than the obvious travelogue conceit): first, no 80-minute time limit; and second, instead of track-by-track commentary, I'll be grouping the music selections together based on geography (don't worry, though, I'll still write a shit-ton--in fact, I'm pretty sure ). I'm honestly not sure how frequently this feature will recur. As mentioned above, there will definitely be another installment next month; after that, though, it's up in the air. Maybe I'll only make future installments when I'm actually traveling somewhere; maybe I'll revisit trips I've taken in the past; maybe I'll invent imaginary road trips. It all depends on how much time I have on my hands, basically. But in the meantime, please enjoy my guided musical tour through the Midwest; and, as I'm sure I left more than a few notable artists out, feel free to share whatever I've missed in the comments! - Z.H.

Grity Boi: 2 Chainz Gets (Sort of) Serious on FREEBASE

From the "Trap Back" video; © 2 Chainz

Does 2 Chainz take 2 Chainz seriously?

My critical faculties have been wrestling with this question since 2012, when I first heard his solo debut album Based on a T.R.U. Story. For the record, I like 2 Chainz. I'm well aware of his shortcomings--this is, after all, the guy whose 2012 freestyle Funkmaster Flex recently called out as the worst ever on his show--but I also think he's (usually) a far cleverer lyricist than his critics give him credit for. He plows the obsessive furrows of contemporary mainstream hip-hop--namely dope peddling, conspicuous consumption, and "big booty hoes"--with a dirty-limerick wit and class-clown exuberance that, for me at least, overcomes the monotony of those well-worn themes; this might say more about my sophomoric sense of humor than it does about the Artist Formerly Known as Tity Boi, but I can't think of another modern-day rapper who makes me laugh out loud as often as he does. So yeah, I like 2 Chainz. But take him seriously? Hell, like I said--I'm not even sure 2 Chainz takes 2 Chainz seriously.

A few recent events, though, have led me to suspect that there might be more to 2 Chainz than meets the eye of even a confessed apologist like myself. First, there was the performance I caught from his 2 G.O.O.D. 2 Be T.R.U. tour this February at the Midland Theater in Kansas City, Missouri. The show was a multimedia sensory overload, with three video screens onstage blaring specially-created imagery to accompany the songs. Some of that imagery, of course, was exactly what you'd expect from a 2 Chainz show: the literally larger-than-life rumpshakers for "Twerk Season"; the extended (and ludicrous) acrobatic sex scene starring Mr. Chainz himself (in silhouette, mercifully) that introduced "Used 2"; the hood-Michael Bay action theatrics of "Riot." But then there was the montage that opened the set, interspersing narration by Chainz with footage of monumental figures from not only hip-hop, but also sports, film, even politics: from Mike Tyson, Muhammad Ali, and Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balboa to--I shit you not--Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. It was absurdly hyperbolic,of course, but also unexpected enough to make me sit up and take notice; this was the kind of self-conscious grandstanding one would expect from 2 Chainz' label boss and sometimes collaborator Kanye West, not from the man Pitchfork recently described as "rap's court jester of the moment." Here was the reigning figurehead for boneheaded Atlanta trap-rap, explicitly writing himself into hip-hop history, Black history, and American history all at once.

Dystopian Dance Mix Vol. 1: It's a Mother('s Day Mix)

Stolen from somebody's Pinterest, but I'm willing to bet this is Public Domain

Editor's Note: Way back in the distant past of my early twenties, I co-ran a pop culture blog similar to this one called the Modern Pea Pod. It was a great experience overall: I got some modicum of exposure for my writing, interviewed people like rock'n'roll pioneer Wanda Jackson and Kid Congo Powers of the Gun Club, and built up a backlog of content that I can now exploit for Throwback Thursdays when I'm too busy and/or lazy to write something new for this blog. Probably my favorite thing about the whole project, though, was our monthly Mixtape: an actual blueprint for making an actual, two-sided, 90-minute cassette tape of songs around a particular theme, complete with timecodes. It was, like most other things related to the Modern Pea Pod, a ludicrously anachronistic and overly complicated exercise (I'm pretty sure we were the only blog ever to advertise via black-and-white flyer, too). But it was also a lot of fun, and a chance to write about music that we loved but that wasn't necessarily "relevant" for a traditional review.

So, in my ongoing effort to strip the Pea Pod's corpse of every last bit of its salvageable flesh (ew), I'm pleased to introduce the spiritual successor to the Modern Pea Pod Mixtape: the Dystopian Dance Mix. The main difference this time around is that it's not meant to be a cassette tape, because this is 2014 and I'm not an insane person. Instead, we're taking advantage of real live 21st century technology and making the playlists streamable via Spotify. My one concession to the old anachronistic format is that each playlist will come in under 80 minutes, the idea being that you could burn it to a CD if you were so inclined (and if you owned all of the music, of course). I plan on getting these playlists out every month or so; the themes for the first two months are a little clichéd and predictable (Mother's Day and Father's Day for May and June, who'da thunk), but you can look forward to more inspired entries after I've gotten warmed up. So here it is, folks: my gift to all the mothers and motherfuckers out there reading this. Enjoy! - Z.H.

Dear Elitists: Shakespeare Was More Hip-Hop Culture Than High Culture

Image Public Domain; crude adornments by me via Snoopify

This week, an infographic by designer and data scientist Matt Daniels has been making the rounds, ranking the number of unique words used by various hip-hop artists compared to the plays of William Shakespeare, as well as Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. It's a fun little study that doesn't claim to do much other than quantify and contextualize the vocabularies of significant rappers alongside two titans of the Western literary canon. This did not, however, prevent it from raising the hackles of Internet elitists (see, I'm not calling them racists) on the comments section and Facebook post for The Atlantic's blog discussing the piece. Apparently, the plebeian likes of Ghostface Killah and Kool Keith--both of whom, I should add, have apparently employed more unique words than the Bard--don't deserve to be placed anywhere near the lofty heights of Shakespeare, who after all invented human nature as we know it.

I know, I know, getting mad at Internet commenters for being hateful and pretentious is like shaking one's fist at the wind for blowing--and, to be fair, I will note that the comments on the Atlantic blog proper are a lot more well-reasoned and generous than the ones on social media (yeah, go figure). But there's something disheartening about seeing this evidence of hip-hop's lack of acceptance in mainstream intellectual culture in 2014, especially from a readership of mainly college-educated liberals who would otherwise be all too proud of their open-mindedness and highly cultivated, eclectic tastes. And it's disheartening especially because, when one looks past the cultural baggage, Shakespeare has a whole hell of a lot more in common with hip-hop culture than he has with "high culture."

Somethin 'Bout the Things U Do: We on 1 by DJ Rashad, 1979-2014

Image stolen from Beantown Boogiedown

It's a sad but unavoidable fact that any discussion of We on 1, the new EP by Chicago DJ Rashad Harden, will inevitably be overshadowed by his tragic death last weekend at the age of 34. But this won't be another eulogy--not least because I'm hardly qualified to write one. I'm no expert on Rashad, nor on footwork, the house-derived street dance music he is widely credited with innovating. But I did think his breakout album, Double Cup, was one of the best records I heard last year; and I think We on 1 stands as further proof of a talent that will be sorely missed.

Throwback Thursday: The Pixies Reunion on Film

From loudQUIETloud: A Film About the Pixies; © MVD Visual

Editor's Note: This week has been a busy one on the academic front, so I've been lax in updating the ol' blog. But this week also saw the release of the first album by legendary alternative rock band the Pixies since 1991's Trompe le Monde, so fortunately I was able to dig up just the thing for Throwback Thursday. I wrote this piece in 2006, when new material was still emerging from the Pixies' first reunion in 2004. Incidentally, I caught them on that tour, at the State Theater in Detroit, and it was fantastic. Also, that was ten years ago. Jesus Christ, I'm old. Anyway, here's my Pixies review. It's very mid-2000s, both in its somewhat snarky tone and in its reference to, Good Lord, MySpace. But what do you do. I'll probably be back next week with a review of the new Pixies record. Probably. In the meantime, enjoy! - Z.H.

In an era when mystery was almost as important to the development of a great alternative rock act as guitar or drums, the Pixies were quite possibly the most mysterious of them all. Armed with inscrutable lyrics about Surrealist cinema and Nimrod's Sons, an arty visual aesthetic that precluded group photos on the album covers, and a stage presence that boiled down to standing stock still and playing as viscerally as possible, they were a truly enigmatic force, more like a coven of obscure European avant-gardists than a mere Bostonian rock band. Even today, elements of their all-too-brief epoch remain shrouded in mystery: things like the precise motivations behind their breakup in 1992, or the much-whispered-about sexual tension between bassist Kim Deal and lead songwriter/vocalist Charles "Black Francis" Thompson. There's still a sense that we'll never really get to know the Pixies, and if anything, that makes them all the more enticing.

It also goes a long way toward explaining why their reunion in 2004 came as such a surprise: engimas don't get back together for sold-out world tours, they don't conduct extensive interviews, and they certainly don't release upwards of half a dozen CDs and videos within a two-year period to document their return to the concert stage. But the Pixies did. And so you'll have to excuse my kneejerk reaction to the first couple minutes of their new DVD, Live at the Paradise in Boston, which is something along the lines of, "This is the most surreal thing I've ever fucking seen." There they are, the mythical Pixies, in all their glory, playing what might be their last intimate club date as a band together. And what do they do? Stroll onstage, shuffle around a little bit, and then tear into… "La La Love You?"

Celebrating 25 Years of the Game Boy with Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters

© Nintendo

Last week was the Nintendo Game Boy's 25th anniversary. It's a weird experience, realizing that the hunk of plastic and silicon I used to play with in the back seat of my parents' car is now a quarter of a century old. If the Nintendo Game Boy were a person and not a handheld video game system, it would be old enough to buy booze and maybe not get carded. Old enough to settle down and start a family of its own. I'll spare you the ubiquitous "Game Man" jokes--okay, I'll admit it, I'm just jealous that I didn't think of it first--but the whole thing is so weird that I'm almost in denial about it. 25th anniversaries are things that happen to stuff from my parents' generation, like Abbey Road or, I dunno, Star Wars. Could it really have been 25 years ago that I first played Tetris and Super Mario Land? (Well, no...I'm pretty sure I didn't get mine until a few years after launch. But you know what I mean.) Am I really this goddamn old?

The answer is yes. Yes, I am. Old enough, in fact, that upon hearing the announcement last week, I felt the irresistible nostalgic pull to return to some original Game Boy games. My first thought was to dust off the aforementioned Mario Land, but that game is so short and breezy--a half hour to beat at best, if you're a 2D Mario vet--that it really shouldn't require a special occasion to revisit. Instead, I decided to try a Game Boy game I've never played before, 1991's Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters.

Throwback Thursday Bonus: Double Indemnity

© Paramount Pictures Corporation

Editor's Note: Yeah, I already posted a Throwback Thursday piece today, but then I was reminded that Billy Wilder's classic film noir, Double Indemnity, is 70 years old today. As an occasional film scholar and an avid fan of all things noir, I felt I would be remiss if I were to let that milestone pass without acknowledging it in some way. So here's a piece I wrote in 2006 as a review for the film's then-most recent reissue on DVD. Keep in mind that this piece is itself almost a decade old now, written while I was still an undergraduate (and it shows). But it's a decent little piece of juvenilia all the same. I've cut it down a bit to remove all references to the specific DVD edition, which means there also won't be any discussion of the miserable 1973 made-for-TV remake. And that's just as well; I wouldn't want to make Mr. Wilder spin in his grave on today of all days. So anyway, happy birthday, Double Indemnity... you cold, bleak son of a bitch. - Z.H.

No discussion of film noir is complete without Billy Wilder's 1944 masterpiece Double Indemnity. Not because it was the first; the beginnings of the genre go back to John Huston's The Maltese Falcon in 1941, if not even earlier, to a brief mini-tradition of American B-films stemming roughly from the end of the 1930s and the beginning of the 1940s. But what does make Double Indemnity so historically significant is its placement as one of the first truly influential films noir, and certainly the most pronounced execution of that style's essential narrative and visual elements to date. Double Indemnity's release in 1944 puts it ahead of the crop of 1945 films that caused French critics to originally coin the phrase "film noir"; its success, netting seven Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, paved the way for a new period of credibility in the genre, allowing for a brilliant, if short-lived run of similarly-themed films in the post-war era.

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.

Thoughts on Recent Mashups

© The Melker Project

I love mashups--really, any kind of aural collage or remix--more than a reasonable person probably should. During my preteen years, I wasted hours on my Pioneer double cassette deck, mixing everything from Badfinger songs to The Hobbit on audio book into bastard combinations of Frank Zappa's Lumpy Gravy and YouTube Poop. To this day, there are mashups I prefer to any of their constituent parts: a 2005 version of LCD Soundsystem's "Daft Punk is Playing at My House," mixed with Janet Jackson's "Miss You Much" and ingeniously titled "Janet Jackson is Playing at My House," has been stuck in my head for almost a decade now, despite the song itself having seemingly succumbed to the twin Internet plagues of time and DMCA notices. And yeah, I'm one of those assholes who gets legitimately excited whenever a new Girl Talk album is announced.

So it should probably come as no surprise that I instantly fell in love when I heard New York DJ Scott Melker's series of mashup EPs combining recent mainstream hip-hop hits with '70s-'90s pop. My younger sister, who I don't even think would be embarrassed to be publicly described as a Hall and Oates fan, introduced me to last year's Ballin' Oates, the collection that finally gave us the combination of the blue-eyed soul duo's "Rich Girl" and Rich Boy's "Throw Some D's" we never knew we needed. There's also the wonderfully-titled Trill Collins, which left me surprised and frankly dismayed by the amount of latent affection I have for the solo music of Phil Collins, and the even-more-wonderfully-titled Skeetwood Mac, which mixes 2 Chainz' "Yuck!" with the Rumours cut "The Chain"...'nuff said. Most recently at the time of this writing, Melker released Red Hot Trilli Peppers: my least favorite of the bunch, but only because the Chili Peppers have a less interesting body of work than any of the other artists; whatever your feelings on the original songs, pairing B.o.B.'s "Headband" with "Give It Away" is still an inspired move.