Bill Summers & Summers Heat, "Jam the Box" (1981)

I love hand-drawn album covers. Homeboy definitely got his roller-ruler out for this one.

For track 1 side 1, percussionist Bill Summers and his dream team the "Summers Heat" attempt to lay out a manifesto for the album, first addressing the question of "what is the box?" before proceeding to "jam" said box for the remainder of the LP. Naturally, this is accomplished over a crunchy drum machine beat and wonderfully nasty synth bass.

On the other hand, their thesis is not expressed with a great deal of conceptual rigour:

We gave you a beat, dance and call it what you want to

La la la la, this is what you're dancing to

It does have a name, after all

It's The Box, that is what we call it

(chorus)

We call it The Box,

Makes you jump right out your socks

Don't stop

We've got a lot to saaaaaay

Summer Heat, if it takes you eight lines to inform me that I'm dancing to a box, I'm not surprised you got a lot to say.

Bill Summers And Summers Heat - We Call It The Box by doggziller

This track is a heater but it does get a bit repetitive and I would normally mix out half-way. So if you get bored, do make sure you fast forward to the five-minute mark where Bill Summers at last gets down to brass tacks and defines the meaning of "the box".

I guess it's some kind of outer-space box? Bill doesn't explain it all that clearly, really.

Vanity 6, "If A Girl Answers (Don't Hang Up)" (1982)

The main thing to understand about Prince is that he is very great, amazing, the best.

Back in the '80s, music was just foaming up out of Prince, it couldn't be checked. If he was down at the dry-cleaners on a Thursday morning having his lavender banana sling cleaned and pressed in time for the weekend, and he started drumming his fingers on the counter while he waited for fifteen seconds, by the time he pulled up the purple Honda 400A into the big driveway at Paisley Park he would have that shit worked up into a dancefloor banger, then lay down and mix all the tracks before lunch and just turf the master tapes atop a huge pile on the back lawn. Followed by an entire afternoon of sex, topped off with coconut rum mojitos by the pool at sundown. 

Warner Brothers weren't trying to release nine Prince albums every weekend, so the man generally had a few side projects on the go under the pseudonym "Jamie Starr", just dashing off classics like 777-9311 for The Time. Reportedly Prince not only composed and produced this tune but laid down all the tracks except Morris Day's lead vocal and Jesse Johnson's guitar solo - not that they couldn't have played it themselves, the band having been put together by Prince primarily so that he could go on tour with a support act that was capable of competently playing the songs that he wrote for them (you get the sense that there's not really any such thing as "collaborating with Prince").

Pretty sure Prince drew this too.

Today's track is from another Prince side-project, "Vanity 6"... this LP includes the excellent "Nasty Girl" but I'm featuring the little-heard "When A Girl Answers (Don't Hang Up)", built around an entertaining call-and-response quasi-rap in which a couple of "party girls" bitch each other out over the phone - save that one of the "girls" is transparently Prince just affecting a sassy voice. Oh Prince, you delightful little faun!

Vanity 6 - If A Girl Answers (Don't Hang Up) by doggziller

Sonny Charles, "One Eyed Jacks" (1982)

 There are various reasons to like a song apart from how you feel about it as music. Both Ben and I, for example, have a fondness for a meta-genre which I have just this instant decided to call Overextended Metaphor Groove (OMG).

As the name suggests, these are songs where the artist has committed to shoe-horning all their passions/joys/torment into the framework of a single over-arching metaphor. Sonny Charles' "One-Eyed Jack" for example, is basically a song about player-hating expressed mainly with reference to playing cards (and with total sincerity).

"The one-eyed jack is a mysterious card,

only one side you can see."

Taking a scientific approach, I quickly counted the total number of lines in the song and divided by the number of lines that contain explicit card game references (chorus counted only once). This gave an OMG compliance ratio of 53.33%, i.e. just over half of all lines in the song have some nonsense about card games in them. This is actually much lower than I expected and definitely shows the value of taking a hard-nosed, evidence-led approach (to my dismay Sonny went off the rails on the second verse and neglected to mention playing cards at all).

By the way, I have made a shortened edit of this song as after the two minute mark it does nothing but repeat the fairly ordinary chorus for another three minutes (yes, this song has a "chorus-til-fade" segment that lasts longer than the song proper - better to go for a breakdown when you've run out of ideas I'd have thought)

Sonny Charles - One-Eyed Jack

More OMG will be posted as it comes to my attention!

3rd Bass "Brooklyn Queens (The U.K. Power Mix)" (1989)

Seems like hip-hop singles from around 1990 sometimes have these British remixes on them which are usually about making the tunes more "club-friendly". Now, back in those times doing something up "for the club" often meant adding thin synthesizers chords, a house beat, and MIDI orchestra stabs, but occasionally it just meant beefing that shit up. And that's what happened here.

(I'm assuming here that U.K. stands for "the United Kingdom" and not "Ultimate Knowledge" or some shit, but you can never be sure with these rap guys).

While still based around the same core sample, this mix is a pretty noticable improvement on the original - the beat is a lot easier to get down on, the horn samples on the chorus actually make sense musically, and the layering and stripping back of samples gives each verse a different feel.

You don't gotta take my word for it though, first download and listen:
3rd Bass - Brooklyn Queens (The U.K. Power Mix)


...and then compare the original:




The video also features several notable details such as:
- MC Serch's flat-top (note the "3" shaved into the side)
- The intro - ladies if you ain't got me no rings already, don't be talking to me now.
- Jackin' from 3:06... god damn I like to see me some jackin'.
- The very high probability that everyone in the video went to school with MC Serch and Pete Nice. 

...and of course, many many examples of the classic rapper pastime of "pretending to be rich", which, at this point in hip-hop history, was still pretty unconvincing most of the time. See also:

What's that you're holding guys, like, twenty-three dollars? Come on.

OVS "Crimes of Passion" (1985)

In my system, 1985 is pretty much a last chance year. If a record says '86 or '87 on the label I will not touch that mess with a barge-pole borrowed from a disliked neighbour (unless of course it's "So" by the delightful Peter Gabriel).

That is my shit right here.

Even then, I have to make allowances before dropping the needle on a joint from 1985, because odds on someone will have made some bad decisions. e.g. The snares will probably be too loud, or there will be no bassline, or a melodic hook will be played by pitch-shifting a sample. I don't know why a few months' drift in production trends makes such a difference, but it does. "Crimes of Passion" by Dutch outfit OVS, however, sounds like an earlier production, possibly because cocaine was less readily available in Holland.

(In fact from the limited information available on line, I suspect it may be a release of a tune from '82 - which kind of makes all this nonsense about production year a bit irrelevant).


I think Ben put it best when he characterized vocalist Bernard Oattes' voice by pointing out that you can't imagine him meaning anything remotely rude or sleazy, regardless of the actual lyrics. His is a pure voice, an angelic voice - almost asexual, certainly without a smidgen of lasciviousness. You can't help feeling that the "Crimes of Passion" referred to in the song could only be something like "holding hands when a policeman can see" or "teasing with intent to tease".

Bernard van Oattes, today.

 
By my reckoning this is a near perfect pop song, hit the link and see who you believe.


OVS - Crimes of Passion

Licky "African Rock" (1979? 1980?)

I think this is one of those obscure low-rent studio productions where they spent a day recording a bunch of tracks with session musicians and made up a new name for the band on each song. So I guess it was pretty near the end of the session when somebody came up with "Licky" as a band name.

"Licky, man, it's like Sexxy but it sounds more sexual in your mouth when you say it" explained Larry Robinson while frantically rubbing his nose "I'm about that mouth feel."

High fives all 'round.

So anyway, Licky is the B-side. Bizzarrely, the A-side is the exact same recording but with all the percussion turned down in the mix, and as an over-dub a man sings off-key in a kind of trembly, stage fright voice while randomly shaking a tambourine that has about a hundred too many microphones pointed at it. It is like someone doing bad karaoke of Osibisa. The track is still called "African Rock" but the band is now "Dream Lovers". I doubt that anyone anywhere has ever listened to the A-side of this record all the way through.

It's disco, by the way, but in all the right places - no strings, plenty of augogo, hot synth solos and bass that gets slapped, sure, but not in an abusive way. The concept of this song is that an African rock is travelling from America to Africa to learn about itself. Initially the rock doubts its abilities but it receives encouragement from nearby backing vocalists in the end it succeeds. It is kind of "a journey" I guess.

(B-side wins again).

Licky - "African Rock"

I can't go for that - for president

Okay, so we were just listening to 'I can't go for that' by Hall and Oates and we we're all like "This might just be the most widely appealing song in the world". Like, Murray heard them playing it on an easy listening radio station at his corporate work job today and everyone stopped typing and hung up their telephones and started singing together and waving their index fingers at each other when it went "No can do!". We also played it in the club on Saturday night and the ladies were getting buck wild and dudes were taking their shirts off and air horns were sounding all over the place.
Also Murray said that he thinks it was the only song to be number one on the top of the pop and r'n'b charts simultaneously.
Best song ever? Ask your mum

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTKS3aP5eAg