The Season Came To An End: Freestyle Brings Loneliness To A Crowded Dance Floor
21 April 2007
After what seems like months (because, oh wait, it was), I’ve posted the paper that I presented at the EMP Pop Conference back in April. (Thanks to Stylus for the nudge.) If you missed the paper I presented last year, here it is. The two topics are quite stylistically different, but they both concern music that was very crucial to the way I listened to music growing up.
I can remember the first time we ever met
The sun was shining
Love was gleaming in the air
You caught my eye and the next thing that I knew
I was in love – I was so in love with you
We were so close for a season of my life
I wanted so much to have you for my wife
But something changed;
The season came to an end.
I had to leave you
And that’s where my heartache began.
Those lyrics are from Stevie B’s “Spring Love,” a 1988 top-10 dance track that was pretty unavoidable on New York radio, and that even floated to the midrange of the Billboard Hot 100. Over at imeem, you can get a feel for how those words sound in a musical context. (Apologies for the forced login, and for missing out on the little dance I did when I read this paper in Seattle.)
Stevie B was a big name in the genre of freestyle, the strain of dance music that was popular among teenagers in New York City and the music that inadvertently soundtracked a lot of my top-40-listening marathons when I was in grade school. Back then, as an eleven-year-old with boundless energy, I would dance along with the songs, which, thanks to their reappropriation of electro, melded seamlessly into synthpop hits of the time like “Perfect Way.”
Today, though, bogged down by 20 or so years and the keyboard-jockey requirements of my job, the way I hear these songs has changed. It’s become less about the beat, and more focused on the lyrics—in part because of place, in part because of the production of these songs, which put the vocals front and center. What struck me, as I listened to the dozens of compilations I’ve accumulated over the years (freestyle artists have nothing on Elvis Costello when it comes to relentlessly reissuing material), is how so much of freestyle comes from a place of isolation and revels in that fact, even though its ostensible purpose is to lubricate the movements of people at dance clubs. Much of the genre works with minor keys and yearning lyrics, which combine to create an atmosphere where solitude and loneliness aren’t what the dance floor is an escape from—instead, they lurk in the thick of the crowd.
For those of you whose first experience with freestyle was the Stevie B snippet a few minutes ago, a brief primer: Freestyle was born in New York City’s Latino enclaves; producers like the Latin Rascals and Jellybean Benitez would pick apart early electro tracks like “Planet Rock” and “Trans-Europe Express,” speed up their samples, and sprinkle in Latin-music flourishes like salsa piano and polyrhythms. Over the years, producers, songwriters, and pseudonymous singers like Nayobe, Noel, and Coro would refine the genre into one that was easily recognizable from the moment the first drumbeat hit: reedy, high-pitched vocals that got more points for emotion than for technical proficiency, simple synth breaks, and drum machines that had their hi-hat keys and “treble” settings turned all the way up.
Initially dubbed “Latin hip-hop,” freestyle experienced some cultural isolation in the New York music world. In the Village Voice, Cristina Veran talked to Louis “K7” Sharpe, one of the members of New York freestyle powerhouse TKA, about the early days of the genre:
“Our way to do hip-hop became, ‘Let’s take those same breaks and beats, the hardness of, say, a Rakim track,’ and since we weren’t being embraced as rappers, we sang.” In 1986, their Tommy Boy Records breakout hit “One Way Love” became a top request on black radio powerhouse 98.7 Kiss FM, and the guys hoped their acceptance would reinforce Latinos’ hip-hop profile. They were sadly mistaken.
“They loved us,” K7 recalls, “until we showed up in person, at the station. When they saw that we were Hispanic, that was that.” The very next day, he says, their hit was pulled from Kiss FM rotation and never played again. “Race—that’s the only possible conclusion I could draw,” he says, still palpably frustrated.
Those obstacles were the prelude to freestyle fans later dubbing TKA the “kings of freestyle.” For his part, K7 dismisses that claim; his signature file on the clubfreestyle.com boards says, simply, “there are no kings in freestyle.” And he may have a point; for all of TKA’s citations as royalty, their highest-charting album was their greatest-hits collection, and it only got as high as No. 131 on the Billboard 200.
Freestyle would go on to have two main strains, one based out of New York and the other rooted in Miami. How to tell the difference between the two? Think of the variations in weather between the two cities. As Joey Gardner, a producer and former Tommy Boy Records employee who’s often called the “father of freestyle,” wrote in the liner notes to the 10-disc collection Freestyle’s Greatest Beats:
“New York Freestyle, even in its most polished forms, retained a raw edge and underground sound, using minor chords that made the tracks darker and more moody. The lyrics also tended to be about unrequited love or other more somber themes, dealing with the reality of what inner city teens were experiencing emotionally. Miami records on the other hand, tended to be more optimistic, using major chords similar to those used in early disco giving them a more upbeat sound.”
In both cases, the beats in freestyle were designed for the sweaty confines of the clubs; the Miami strain of freestyle had lyrics that were had more of a sweaty sexuality, typified by Nice N’ Wild’s “Diamond Girl,” which has the couplet “You fit right on my finger / I’m so glad to have me in you.” (A pair of lines that, it should be noted, are much more scandalous to my 31-year-old ears than to those I possessed at 12.) But in New York freestyle, the lyrics often eschewed the hedonism of the dance floor for unabashed reveling in despair and sadness, unrequited love and lost chances.
Adding to this potential for dramatics was the fact that, more often than not, the singers themselves were teenagers whose voices wavered as much as the emotions they were describing. Here, the subject matter and the delivery were well-matched; the agonies described in freestyle’s gloomier songs—love lost, love found, love lost again—are classic teen-diary subjects. Yet they seemed pretty tame, on a grand scale, compared to the litany of woes plaguing high schools that a New York Times article from 1987 referred to as adolescents’ “‘80s problems.” The list: “drug abuse, alcohol abuse, rape, robbery, assault, burglary, arson, bombings, murder, absenteeism, vandalism, extortion, gang warfare, abortion and venereal disease.” Some sample New York Times headlines about the plight: “Young Crack Addicts Find There’s No Help for Them,” “AIDS Threat Brings New Turmoil For Gay Teenagers,” “Madonna’s New Beat Is A Hit, But Song’s Message Rankles.” That last one, of course, was about “Papa Don’t Preach”; for their part, Sweet Sensation gave a freestyle spin on the Supremes’ “Love Child,” and it reached the Billboard top 20 in 1990.
As John Leland pointed out in a 1990 Newsday review of two freestyle albums, the relative youth of the performers meant that the genre’s behind-the-scenes machinations were just as important, if not more, than the performances themselves; he referred to the freestyle world as “a cheaper, more impatient throwback to pop’s Brill Building days.” Songwriters and producers were, indeed, the “stars” of freestyle. They were identifiable by sound and by name, and in many cases, this aspect of sonic identification would result in the performers themselves becoming incidental. Groups like TKA and Sweet Sensation had members swapped in and out even as they had hits on the charts, which helped make freestyle as anonymous as it was ubiquitous during its radio heyday–Z100, the top-40 station in freestyle epicenter New York City, would plug seemingly every hole in its programming with freestyle tracks, usually neglecting to back-announce them so that to the non-clubgoer, the songs would only be identifiable by lyrics or synth sounds. I am still today identifying the performers of songs that I’ve known the lyrics to for 20 years.
Today in New York, freestyle still gets a lot of airplay–the radio station WKTU, which was an early champion of the genre before getting switched over to classic rock in the late 1980s, has pretty much devoted its entire recurrent programming block to old freestyle songs (and the odd Madonna tune here and there). There are mega-shows sponsored by the station every three months or so, and bulletin boards devoted to tracking three-song performances by the genre’s most minor acts. Its influence is even felt in contemporary songs like Nelly Furtado’s “Say It Right” and Tracey Thorn’s “It’s All True.” (Stevie B, one of the genre’s giants, recently updated “Spring Love,” collaborating with the rapper Pitbull.) And 20 years after its heyday, listening to freestyle outside of the dance-floor context, with the vocals front and center thanks to those old-school production techniques, the listener is almost forced to focus on the lyrics, where there is enough despair and aching to fill a season’s worth of telenovelas.
Judy Torres–the singer-turned-DJ who hosts a weekly freestyle show on WKTU–put it more succinctly in a 2006 Village Voice preview of a freestyle show at Madison Square Garden: “Freestyle songs are like really dramatic Spanish soap operas–being in love, breaking up, catching someone cheating on you–intense and passionate, slightly overdramatic.”
In both the telenovela (the “Spanish soap operas”) Torres is referring to and freestyle, an American art form is transformed by Latino culture, and the drama factor is upped substantially. While there are substantial divergences between the two art forms, there’s no better example of the similarities between telenovelas and freestyle than the spoken-word break from the extended version of Lisa Lisa’s rumination on chastity “I Wonder If I Take You Home,” where the protagonist directly confronts the (probably pretty weaselly) guy who’s trying to get her to bed:
Girl: No, it’s just that I feel you’re rushing me
Guy: Ok, ok…Since you don’t love me… and don’t wanna be with me
Girl: No, it’s not that. It’s just that I’m afraid of getting hurt…I don’t know. I just keep asking myself….Should I REALLY take you home? What do you think?
In the end, she doesn’t really care what he thinks; the final minute of the song has the guy softly muttering “I wanted her, I really, really wanted her…” while Lisa Lisa is riffing on the word “home.” Lisa Lisa’s resolve is actually in keeping with the telenovela –and, thanks to the vocal presence of the jilted guy, the song is oddly in keeping with the freestyle trope of love lost and longed for.
Often, drama in freestyle songs goes hand-in-hand with a fair amount of despair and longing. After Shannon’s “Let The Music Play,” which is often cited as the first “freestyle” song to hit the clubs, the second freestyle song that could be defined as a “hit” was Nayobe’s “Please Don’t Go,” a 1984 Patrice Rushen-sampling track sung by a 16-year-old from the Bronx that starts off as a piano-backed soul torcher before throwing synths into the mix. Its lyrics allude to a soap-opera-worthy plot involving murder and “hidden anger” inside the eyes of the man Nayobe is addressing, but inside the chorus is a need for companionship that’s simply stated—and tinged with fear of facing the world alone:
Please don’t go, please don’t go
Don’t go there tonight
It just isn’t right
You may not come back to me
Our future you’ll never see
You’re throwing my life plans away
Please don’t go
What those “life plans” may be—beyond the most obvious choice of presumed eternal love–are never revealed in the lyrics. But the three-syllable sentiment howled in the chorus—“please don’t go”—is one that echoes throughout many of freestyle’s songs, no matter what the consequences of the loved one staying might be. Take Noel’s “Silent Morning,” which describes love-drunk bliss in its verses–only to have the crushing disappointment that’s the reason for the song’s being revealed in its chorus:
Silent Morning, I wake up and you’re not by my side
Silent Morning, You know how hard I try
Silent Morning, They say a man’s not supposed to cry
Silent Morning, Why did your love have to be a lie
Even freestyle’s more upbeat songs–those that describe happiness, or requited love—don’t take the good life for granted. Two songs in particular, Giggles’ “Love Letter” and Sweet Sensation’s “Sincerely Yours,” are sung from the perspective of women who are actually happy in their relationships. But the lyrical conceit for both is the love letter–the classic form for lovers who are experiencing loss in the immediate sense. First, there’s the Sweet Sensation track, in which our heroine is confused by her paramour’s stony silence from far away:
Dear as I write you this letter
The pain in my heart boy has run so deep
I fear we won’t be together
Without you my life feels so incomplete
You said our love will last forever
But you still haven’t answered my letters
As it turns out, the guy has been answering, but for whatever reason his letters haven’t been delivered, at least not until it’s time for the song’s bridge. (Maybe the price of stamps went up.) The song ends happily; the closing lyric, before the final chorus kicks in, is ” Now I know we’ll be together / Cause you just answered my letter.” (Here’s hoping that a sequel, in which the man is the victim of a balky e-mail server, is currently in the works.)
The letter written by Giggles has a similar theme of happiness plagued by uncertainty, although the “love letter” she is crafting dwells much more on the low emotions that plague her every moment of happiness:
When we’re together and all alone
The meaning of love really shows
Never a tear falls from my eyes
Because with you my tear is dry
So I write this letter for the world to know
And see how true love can be
Like many freestyle songs, “Love Letter” is written in a minor key, which only adds to its lurking gloom; as Gardner noted in his liner notes to Freestyle’s Greatest Beats, minor keys were one of the characteristics that if not all New York freestyle songs shared, the majority did. Nigel Tufnel’s citation of D minor as the saddest key around may have been a joke, but when you listen to a lot of freestyle songs in a row, the pervasiveness of certain notes only serves to highlight the singers’ anguish.
Minor keys were essential to the career of Stevie B, who was arguably second to Lisa Lisa among the most successful artists to be associated with the freestyle scene. (Although it should be noted that his biggest hit, the chart-topping “Because I Love You (The Postman Song),” was a straight-up ballad; much like their compatriots in hard rock, freestyle artists had to go completely soft in order to cross over fully.) Stevie B was from Miami, and his first hit was the pickup track “Party Your Body” (sample lyric: “I have a while in case you want more and more / So pretty lady head on to the dance floor”) what made Stevie so successful across the freestyle board, though, was his integration of New York freestyle’s elements into his music. Here’s another lyric from “Spring Love”:
I remember when we first started
You came to me and you were broken hearted
I took you in and wiped all your tears away
I gave you loving more than any other gave
Don’t you know I’m the one and I love you girl
I don’t care what they say you know you are my world
Come back home to the one
Who loves you more and more
Soon you’ll see that it was me you were searchin for
Note the lack of detail in these lyrics; we know that this was a rebound relationship and that Stevie, as he sang in the lyric quoted earlier, was planning on proposing marriage to this woman. But beyond that, specifics are sketchy—this love song doesn’t even have the obligatory reference to the color of Stevie’s beloved’s eyes. “Spring Love,” like “Silent Morning” and the love-letter songs discussed earlier, is written from a distance; the lyrics are aimed at a “you,” but the anguish at abandonment implies that the “you” being addressed could physically be anywhere, whether in the same room or another state. The songs are like long-distance dedications of sorts—the lyrics are so consumed by the protagonists’ need to be with their love, they’ll eschew people who want to be with them (presumably, they’re out there) and instead devote their most precious energies to a probably fruitless attempt to return to a life they once thought they knew.
But details about these lost lovers are rare—references to the past, and the reasons why this break in love is so heart-wrenching, are usually glossed over, and given as much time as a quick-cut scene in a music-video montage. In one sense, this universalizes the experience of loneliness any and all jilted listeners out there; the songs provide the template for sadness (“something changed,” “why did your love have to be a lie”), and the listener can fill in the blanks with his or her own experiences. On a more practical note, the interchangeable nature of many vocalists within the genre almost necessitates this blank-slate creation; in the case of vocal groups, for example, turning the subjects of these songs into a faceless parade of sadness made swapping out members that much easier.
Anonymity and sadness; despite its cracking beats and irresistible choruses freestyle, with its middling successes and its current status as a footnote in the history of pop, may be the loneliest genre within the crowded dance floor of dance music. Lyrically, it never succumbs to the hedonism of the dance floor, instead focusing on the heartache that caused people to escape there in the first place; at the same time, its songs are performed by a parade of faceless voices whose emotions are only valid until their season—as dictated by the contracts they have with the producers and labels that make up the genre’s backbone—comes to an end.