By Jenn Sussman aka DJ Belladonna

Deee-lite

1. Deee-lite “Deee-lite Theme” – Anyone who has ever been to one of my Grooveskool parties will recognize this jam from early ‘90s Lower East Side club scene darlings Deee-Lite’s 1990 debut album, World Clique; since the very first night, it’s been my opening track, my own personal Grooveskool theme song. The song perfectly sets the tone for a funky evening, reflecting elements of hip-hop, funk, soul and retro dance genres, just like Grooveskool itself. I remember picking up World Clique when I was thirteen years old, when everyone and their mother was getting their groove on to “Groove Is In The Heart”, and I distinctly remember lying sprawled out my bed with the cassette’s liner notes in hand and realizing that I had never had so much fun listening to an album before. Deee-lite has always been the life of the party, and their sound is a product of the downtown New York City house music scene that spawned them, their own quirky, “global village” flavor, courtesy of Ukranian-born Super DJ Dmitri and Japan’s DJ Towa Tei. Add the fabulous downtown diva Lady Miss Kier and you’ve got a party in your eardrums – which is why I selected this track as Grooveskool’s anthem.

2. James Brown “Don’t Be A Drop-Out” – The Godfather of Soul always found time to drop some wisdom on his listeners, in and amongst all of the getting down, feeling like a sex machine, and having a funky good time. In fact, most people are only familiar with a handful of JB’s most well-known singles, which while excellent, pale in comparison with the brilliance of some of his older work. “Don’t Be A Drop-Out” was recorded as a single in 1966, as JB went deeper into funk styles and further away from the soul sounds that he began with, and during a period of time when JB was an outspoken social activist and frequently tackled topics affecting the black community in his music. Having dropped out of school himself in the seventh-grade, this particular topic was one that JB could speak on with some personal authority. The message is wrapped up inside of a tight funk groove, with harmonized backing vocals reminiscent of The Four Tops and The Temptations. This is one of my all-time favorite JB tracks, and it shows yet again how James Brown not only helped to shape the sound of the eras he lived through, but his music subsequently became the sound of those eras. To have done so is more than artistry – it is genius.

3. Kanye West “Addiction” – The thing that draws me to Kanye’s earliest recordings is the uniqueness of the beats and the background music, especially since by the time he recorded his own albums he had already given so much of his behind-the-scenes talent to so many for so long. He’s lost a lot of that creativity with each successive album he releases (and I’m damn sick of hearing his vocoder-purified singing), but if you go back to his sophomore release Late Registration (2005), you’ll find some of the better hip-hop to have been recorded in the 2000’s. The best track by far is “Addiction”, a sexy, jazzy yet urgent piece about indulgence in vice with an excellent vocal sample from Etta James’ version of “My Funny Valentine”, and which assumes that every listener has some sort of addiction in their lives, be it money, women or drugs; “What’s your addiction / Is it money, is it girls, is it weed / I been afflicted / By not one, not two, but all three…”. The track ends with Kanye attempting to convince his girlfriend to engage in a threesome, in one of the sexiest endings to a hip-hop song in quite awhile. If you don’t have a personal vice, this song will make you want to go out and get one.

4. Soho “Hot Music” – This is hands down one of the hottest tracks to emerge from the deep house scene in the ‘90s. Blue Note samples, a hard drum break that all but insists that you get up and dance, and some funky sax to round it all out. There’s some confusion out on the web over whether or not this is the same Soho that had a hit in the early ‘90s with the groovy, Smiths-sampling “Hippychick”, but just based on the huge difference in sound I’m pretty sure it’s not. Deep house is best consumed out on a dance floor, since the rhythmic beats and infrequent variation from a central musical theme for four to six minutes can quickly become repetitive; unless, of course, you’re using that four to six minutes to find a deep groove within your soul as the DJ spins and the crowd morphs around you and becomes one with the music. Regardless, this track never gets old for me whether I’m dancing or chilling. The scene lives on at Sin Sin in New York City’s East Village, a weekly Wednesday night events that parties like it’s 1993.

5. PM Dawn “In The Presence Of Mirrors” – Another artist whose body of work is much greater than the singles most people know them by, PM Dawn’s 1991 lengthily-named debut album Of The Heart, Of The Soul, and Of The Cross: The Utopian Experience has been a favorite of mine since the tenth grade. Yes, this is the album with “Set Adrift On Memory Bliss” on it, with it’s well-executed samples of Spandau Ballet’s “True” used to such excellent effect, the PM Dawn song that always makes you think of lost loves, missed opportunities, and long-forgotten memories. However, it is also the album with “Paper Doll”, “Even After I Die” and this playlist track on it, which never fails to bring people up to the booth to ask me who it is when I play it. Perhaps one of the better aspects of music’s cyclical nature and the tendency of newer bands to echo older ones is that I can easily get peoples’ groove going with something they’ve never heard before, even if it’s almost twenty years old. [Author’s note: Apologies to anyone who feels as old as I did upon realizing that “Set Adrift On Memory Bliss” came out nineteen years ago. I mean, how can that possibly be?!]

6. Prince “Money Don’t Matter 2 Night” – No matter what he calls himself or how bizarre he gets, Prince rocks in about seven different ways. Few artists have a body of work that is so self-sustaining and archetypal that the artist literally becomes his own genre, but such can be said about Prince. I’ll bet that if you polled a group of friends with diverse musical tastes among them, every one of them will have at least one favorite Prince jam, and probably more than one. I know metalheads that rock out to “Darling Nikki”, classical music fans who get a groove on to “Raspberry Beret”, classic rock fans who’ll hold up their lighters for “Purple Rain”, and new wave fans that bust out their skinny ties for “Take Me With U”. Personally, I have three favorite Prince songs; “Little Red Corvette” from 1999 (1982), “The Question Of U” from the Prince-penned soundtrack to the 1990 film Graffiti Bridge, and this playlist pick from 1991’s less-than-stellar Diamonds And Pearls, when Prince dumped longtime backing band The Revolution for the inferior New Power Generation. I should also to give an honorable mention to the Prince song most likely to get me out on the dance floor, the extremely funky and equally controversial “Sexy MF” from 1992’s Love Symbol LP.

7. Gnarls Barkley “Who’s Gonna Save My Soul” – Whenever I hear this beautiful and heartfelt track from Gnarls Barkley’s second album (2008’s The Odd Couple), I always wish that Marvin Gaye were still alive so that he might have sung it. No offense to the soulful pipes of G.B. and former Goodie Mob vocalist Cee-Lo Green, but the soul of this song has gravity and an arrangement style that harkens back to “Inner City Blues”, “You’re All I Need To Get By”, or “That’s The Way Love Is”. Overall, I much prefer G.B.’s 2006 debut, St. Elsewhere (even if it did unleash one of the most inescapable earworms of all time) for its mix of musical styles, its quirkiness, and the excitement that comes along with hearing a new Danger Mouse project for the first time. I didn’t dislike The Odd Couple, per se, but when you condition the public to expect the new and the different with every album like Danger Mouse has, your own act can sometimes be hard to follow.

8. Tammi Terrell “All I Do Is Think About You” – Back in the heyday of the Motown sound, people really knew how to tell a story; they knew how to convey heartache, yearning, and sorrow on wax in a way that is rarely found today. One of my favorite examples is this single by Tammi Terrell, a woman best known for her many duets with Marvin Gaye, like “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and “Ain’t Nothing Like The Real Thing”. Terrell became a star thanks to her work with Gaye, but a malignant brain tumor ended her brief career and brought about her death at the age of twenty-four; the effect of which sent a distraught Marvin Gaye into a four-year period of isolation including a complete hiatus from recording and performing. When I learned about that after having learned the lyrics to this song, I wondered if perhaps Tammi might have loved Marvin but never told him. This beautiful track is now a rarity, only to be found on classic rare R&B and soul compilations like Lost and Found: Real R&B and Soul (2010), curated by Keb Darge and Paul Weller.

9. Phoenix “Victim Of The Crime” – This Phoenix track is the sound of getting funky, French-style. In the mid-2000’s there was a mini-wave of European rock bands with funk and groove influences, such as Franz Ferdinand, Modest Mouse and Phoenix, and the effect is occasionally like you’re listening to a bunch of white boys playing funky music (which, well, you are). But, in the case of stellar tracks like FF’s “No You Girls”, MM’s “Float On” and this playlist pick from Phoenix, the funk shines through and it becomes less about aping a sound and more about enjoying that sound. Phoenix’s 2004 debut, Alphabetical, is filled with groovy rock gems like “Everything Is Everything”, “Run Run Run” and “(You Can’t Blame It On) Anybody”, and I still find it to be a more enjoyable listen than their 2009 follow up, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix (despite a nifty little nod to Adam Ant the opening track). Perhaps Phoenix was at the forefront of an emerging sound in 2004, but the rest of the indie rock world has caught up since then – which makes Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix sound a little bit like an also-ran.

10. Stereo MCs “Shameless” – Could this be the same Stereo MCs that brought us “Elevate My Mind”, “Connected” and “Step It Up”? That was my question when I first listened to the mature yet funky Deep Down & Dirty LP (2001), which despite not having a true radio-friendly song on it is still easily accessible and danceable in a non cheesy-pop way. Then, not long after I heard that album I came across Stereo MCs’ contribution to the legendary DJ-Kicks album series, where world class DJs mix a full-length set of tracks by artists who have influenced them. Any surprise I felt at Stereo MCs being included amongst DJ-Kicks alums like Tiga, Oakenfold, Nightmares On Wax, Booka Shade and Hot Chip completely, irreversibly disappeared when I listened to their DJ-Kicks set, which is one of the best and most eclectic DJ sets I have ever heard. Every track sent me racing for the computer to learn about the artists, and there’s almost nothing more fun for a DJ than to dig into incredible music that they have never heard before. “Shameless” is the final track on Deep Down & Dirty, and given its mellow tempo I have frequently used it to close Grooveskool. It’s only fitting to close this week’s playlist with it, and I hope that I’ve skooled you to a few new grooves this week.