Starting the dance party is never an easy job. But since Freestyle is the Gravitron-force that brought ALOTR together, I’d like to inaugurate the loot bag with a twin-set of trumpet-synth processionals and serious vocals. Let’s get those brows furrowed and movements angular. The first is from Cynthia, Spanish Harlem’s veteran interpreter. Here is her righteous jam “Thief of Heart” (yes, heart in the singular), featuring a chorus that will forever inspire a modified grapevine-move on the dancefloor (actual or imagined).Next up is Joyce Sims’s 1986 “(You Are My) All and All.” Prepare yourself during the epic intro. Wait for it. Then sink into this stunning vocal. Here Sims’s work is a reminder that we need to shut up and listen to the deep musical trajectory women have forever gifted to dance music. Sims was born and raised in NYC, but rumor has it that she currently lives in Ft. Lauderdale. Nuyorfloridians unite!
These songs capture the dancerly, softy, badass, and bittersweet feelings behind this collective endeavor. They are the anthems that have been our companions through love, work, and play. They can make your mascara run out of pain and/or pleasure. Put them in your makeup bag where they’ll always be available to you as armor, as bolsters for your impulses, as vehicles for your confessions. - (ATV)
2 comments:
Lovely Capi. Might there be something productive in thinking about danced music as well as dance music esp as freestyle now refracts in the halls of memory for those of us old enough to rememember it unironically? Could you please post a disquisition at some later date on RJ's Latest Arrival's "Shackles on my Feet." Not quite what the maroons, quilombos and Frederick Douglass had in mind but I'll take my anti-slavocracy narratives with my cognac and Z. Cavaricci's. Bracho
I looove the songs' introductions you give babe!
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