One of the most successful freestyle groups of the 80s was, like most pop acts of the day, a record label construct. Exposé, formed in 1984 by Pantera Productions, initially consisted of Miami natives Sandra Casanas, Alejandra Lorenzo, and Laurie Miller. "Point of No Return" debuted at number one on the Billboard dance charts in 1985, and the success of the single earned them a contract with Arista Records.
The following year, to the strains of their second hit single, "Exposed to Love," Exposé prepared to begin work on their full-length debut, Exposure. Changes in the group's lineup would stall the album until 1987, but when it was finally released to a #16 position on the charts, Exposure set a new musical record for the group. With chart-topping hits like "Seasons Change," "Let Me Be the One," and "Come Go with Me," Exposé surpassed The Supremes and even The Beatles for the most Billboard Top 10 singles from a single album.
Exposé's current lineup of Anne Curless, Gioia Bruno, Jeanette Jurado (and, occasionally, Kelly Moneymaker) is still coasting on the triple-platinum sales of Exposure. County fairs, "Freestyle Explosion" concerts, gay pride festivals--you name it, they're there.
Depending on who you ask, Lisa Lisa was anywhere from 16 to 20 years-old when she met New York producers Full Force at the Fun House (the same club where DJ/producer Jellybean Benitez discovered Madonna). Despite having had no previous musical experience, Lisa had the type of singing voice that teenage girls could easily sing along with and imitate. That was enough to land her a place at the helm of Full Force's new musical conceit: a freestyle group called Cult Jam consisting of guitarist/bassist Alex Mosely and drummer/keyboardist Mike Hughes. After enjoying considerable success with hip hop act UTFO, Full Force were golden (platinum, actually) after the 1985 release of Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam's eponymous debut.
As was the case with most early freestyle singles, the dancefloor popularity of "I Wonder If I Take You Home" lead to the track's popularity on the airwaves. Columbia Records took note and signed the group, re-releasing the single to worldwide acclaim. It reached #1 on the Billboard dance charts and was quickly certified gold.
Follow-up single "Can You Feel the Beat" climbed the dance charts and spilled over into the R&B charts, and their third single, "All Cried Out," scored them another gold record. All three singles are still old-school radio staples, as are tracks from their following albums. As a matter of fact, we bet if you go to your radio right now and switch it to R&B/Top 40, somewhere, at some point in the immediate future, you'll find yourself dancing to Lisa Lisa's sing-along vocals.
A few years ago, while waiting for my new apartment to finally become available (the previous tenants had been taking their time), I went out into the country, two hours into the west, to move in with my grandparents while I waited. Once, during that slow succession of lazy days, I woke up to a morning that felt like most mornings in my early childhood--with all the windows open, with the smell of my grandmother's cooking, light on the back of a morning breeze, carried throughout the entire house. I went out to my car for something, I forget what, and was greeted by my grandfather, up since daybreak, watering the roses. Just then, somewhere around the corner, perfectly and as if on cue, I heard an approaching car being trailed by the familiar strains of a certain freestyle classic, and somehow, with my bare feet caught mid-tiptoe on the cold driveway I used to tiptoe barefoot through as a kid, avoiding the bees on the lawn, my brain did a sort of memory double-take; it processed the sound of that car booming down the street, and the presence of my grandfather behind me with the garden hose in hand, and the bare feet and my grandmother calling us in to eat, and it settled into some long-forgotten and comfortable nook, but the paradox created by the car keys in my hand and the conscious understanding that I'm no longer seven-years-old and this is no longer my summer home and is, in fact, 20 years older than when I remember it, and smaller at that--that paradox created some new form of memory that surfaces every time I hear an 808 beat.
That song, "Silent Morning," was a top 10 hit in 1987, and everyone in town knew it. Including, most importantly, my older cousins and youngest uncles, who spent every single summer day installing huge carpeted boxes of speakers (were those woofers or tweeters?) in the trunks of their cars. Ride-alongs consisted of my younger cousin and I buckling ourselves into the backseat and having our ribs quite literally rattled by the bass as we sped down the main road.
Noel (born Noel Pagan) caused a considerable ripple with that first single, and although it was his second hit, "Like a Child," that made the biggest wave (it peaked at #1 on the dance charts), it's "Silent Morning" that does it for me. (That embedded video up there, by the way? With the new wave girls in the audience hamming it up for the camera while Noel tries his best tortured artist stance? That totally does it for me, too.)
...Pop, that is. It's technically, as we all know, just an umbrella term for music that's, well, popular (and generally, though not always, manufactured with the express intent to be so). Sometimes it catches and sometimes it don't. Sometimes it's good and sometimes it ain't. (Hi, welcome to Earth.) And this track that, despite ourselves, we're about to gush over? Yes, we know it's everywhere. Yes, radio and TV have probably killed it by now and you've probably already got the whole album anyway. Wouldn't be caught dead, you say? Mas Sexi say relax!
After having been turned down by the likes of Mary J. Blige, Akon, and Hilary Duff, "Umbrella"--written by Terius "Dream" Nash and C. "Tricky" Stewart, the same guys who whipped up that Britney Spears single where Madonna plays the hater grandma--eventually trickled down from Karen Kwak at Universal to Island Def Jam's LA Reid and so, finally, to Rihanna and Jay-Z (who makes an opportunistic play at being the male Madonna by reaching with a rap verse over the beginning of the song).
I wonder what that's like, you know? To have passed up a song that went on to debut at #1 on iTunes on the day of its digital release (the biggest debut in iTunes' six-year history), made history in the U.K. by being the first single by a female artist ever to debut at #1 on the Official Singles Chart on download sales alone, and is still topping nearly every other chart imaginable? I wonder if the bigwigs over at Jive Records are lamenting Britney's lost chance (and, admittedly, lost marbles) at snagging a song that's rumored to have been offered, turned down, and may have made for an impressive comeback. Chris Brown realized the potential there and jumped on it in one hot minute with an answer song called "Cinderella"--it's the exact same song with Brown's own auto-tuned lyrics about "looking for the one with the glass slipper" dubbed over the original musical track. There's also a "remix" (really just a hip hop term for "additional guest rap verses inserted at will") featuring Lil Mama, and it's not nearly as good as her own debut single, "Lip Gloss", but it replaces Jay-Z's original verse and that's good enough for me.
And wouldn't you know it? Rihanna's actually singing! We loved playing "S.O.S." at Meatball Magic, not just because of that Soft Cell sample, but also because no one really cares about vocals when the song is that fun. "Umbrella" caught us off guard, though. It's not exactly a floor-filler; not a ballad or anthem either, really, but it's undeniably irresistible. Her 19-year-old voice, even on that cheesy bridge verse, seems to have matured into something that can hold up to the production. And kudos to whoever mixed the track; it sounds awesome. The tail end of that bridge, when it swells back into the chorus in a slightly altered key, is squeaky clean.
The only other track on the album (titled Good Girl Gone Bad, by the way) that Dream and Tricky mutually collaborated on is "Breakin' Dishes," but if you didn't know better (and I didn't, actually, at first), it could just as easily have been done by Timbaland. It's practically a straight rip of "Maneater," but with a meaner "Sunglasses at Night"-on-a-rampage feel that rumbles up from the floorboards. Those "I don't know who you think I am" and "I'ma fight a man" hooks even sound like they were recorded by Nelly Furtado herself, but while "Maneater" is the modern pop song that all new pop songs are inevitably compared to, "Breakin' Dishes" is bound to be a fleeting and brazen pastiche that will no doubt get asses bouncing for a minute or two.
One of three tracks on the album that actually is produced by Timbaland, however, is "Lemme Get That." Ok, two things. First--that fucking backing track! Imagine a high school marching band parading down the streets of Rihanna's native Barbados playing reggaeton covers. It delights me. I'm literally delighted. You've got to hand it to Timbaland: the man is occasionally absolutely brilliant, and tracks like this, when handed to us along with our asses, seem to exist solely to remind us of that fact right when we're about to forget.
Secondly--this robo-diva persona Rihanna seems to be morphing into? I'm in. Whoever decided to slash her hair into that angular Aeon-Flux 'do and squeeze her into some fetish gear knew exactly what they were doing. It suits that icy android voice of hers--and the current pop-friendly hipster-asshole scene--quite nicely. That's something our friends across the pond do really well. It's that cold Euro-pop that's cool enough to fit in anywhere without being soulless, but has you centered in it's red-hot predatory stare. Alison Goldfrapp, we salute you.
So dance, friends! Ain't no shame! Besides, it's a lot cooler than standing there with your arms crossed.
Freestyle--also known in other forms as Miami bass or, more generally, old-school electro--is a musical genre familiar to most children of the 80s. Those who were cool enough to cruise around in a Camaro IROC-Z with 808 beats pumping out of the trunk (or who had older siblings letting them ride along in that tiny backseat) will wax nostalgically when an old freestyle song comes on the radio, and unless you were already waist-deep in either the goth or butt rock of the era, you can't help but love it to this day.
Widely known as the first freestyle dance track in musical history, "Let the Music Play" has been remixed and covered by others, but it's the original record by Shannon and New York producer Chris Barbosa that made all the waves. Barbosa, along with co-producer Ed Chisolm, isolated the electro funk sound made famous by Afrikaa Bambaataa's "Planet Rock" (whose own sound was birthed by the grandaddies of modern electro, Kraftwerk) by incorporating Latin American dance rhythms and electronic elements taken from the era's emerging new wave movement.
There's still plenty of speculation as to why the resulting sound was dubbed "freestyle." Some believe it's because after the steady and consistent disco beats club DJs had been mixing together up until that point, the syncopated drum machine rhythms in this new sound gave them more creative freedom on the decks. Others believe it's either because of the vocal techniques or the style of dancing that freestyle music spawned. Most likely it's due to a mix-up between a musical group called Freestyle and the sound that became synonymous with them and their contemporaries. Whatever the reason, "Let the Music Play" topped the charts and blazed a trail that's still being tread by artists who incorporate samples and lyrics from well-known freestyle tracks in their music.
Shannon's follow-up single didn't chart quite as well as "Let the Music Play," but it was still embraced in clubs and on the airwaves. "Give Me Tonight" received recent attention from its spot on the Party Monster soundtrack as well, and while it has no shortage of fond affections due to nostalgia and the current music scene's "80s chic" resurgence, "Let the Music Play" is the one that will always be remembered as everyone's "jam." Dance pop, and pop of any species for that matter, would never be the same after that first unmistakable whiplash intro.
Mas Sexi promotes responsible downloading. We love music just as much as you do, and that's why we're excited to share, but please show your love for the artists by buying their music after you've sampled those MP3s we've shot your way. Musicians need to eat too, you know.
If, however, we post a track you'd rather we didn't, or you have something you'd like us to share with the world, drop us a line. We'll see what we can do.
