Since the dawn of recorded pop music in the 1950s, I don’t know if there’s a part of any decade more bereft of mainstream cool than the mid-to-late 80s. It’s a time when the charts were unbothered by the grittiness of punk and Two Tone, disco was dead, the rockabilly revival had flatlined, the New Romantics had (thankfully) given up the ghost and while hip-hop and underground rock were bubbling away in the underground occasionally rearing their heads, the mainstream was rife with under-talented or over-produced slop and quite a bit that was both. Dismayed this not Smoove when considering his latest Wack adventure? Not a bit of it – for our man has balls of steel, not to mention a bafflingly enduring love of 80s boogie and adjacent genres. New jack swing for example. Enter Wack 27 on which Smoove 80s beefs up Bobby Brown’s biggest hit in an 80s boogie-funk style. Well – that’s his prerogative. He’s not done yet though, not by a long shot, for who does he think of for the flip of this 45 but Janet Jackson, reworking a 1986 track so that the original’s godawful 80s ‘baseball bat against the side of a steel dustbin’ drum machine beat is mercifully replaced with something rather more electro-funky. Altogether now, “When I think of yo-ouu!” Calling all 80s fiends – you’re going to be all over this.
(Out now on Wack Records)
