Green Velvet: bad for the soul, good for the heart
There comes a time in most clubbers’ lives, typically about a couple of months into the nightlife honeymoon, when you realise that there is a dark, surreal and slightly jagged side to the surface shine of dayglo and good times that the nigh-time industry likes to project. Those characters who are a little bit too gone; the wandering morals of terrible older men; and the criminal elements who sometimes control the doors. It’s a shocking revelation, sure. But in an awful, terrible way, it can be kind of interesting, too.
No one soundtracks this aggressively mixed feeling better than Green Velvet, aka Chicago producer, label boss and DJ Curtis Jones. Jones is one of the most important people in modern dance music. As Cajmere he has released iconic records such as Percolator and Brighter Days and his Cajual and Relief labels helped to define the second wave of Chicago house and techno. At a push, I probably prefer his work as Cajmere; but it is Jones’ output as Green Velvet that has had most influence on me - and perhaps on the world.
You don’t even need to got that far in to his catalogue. In Jones’ first four records as Green Velvet - 1993’s Velvet Tracks, 1995’s Portamento Tracks, 1996’s The Stalker and 1997’s Destination Unknown EP - he basically said all he had and all that he needed to say, so perfectly did these for records nail his creep techno persona.
I’ve been thinking a lot about minimalism versus maximalism of late. But Green Velvet’s music was neither. Created initially on a “sixty-buck keyboard, a cheap four-track and a cheap drum machine”, Velvet’s tracks are often made of little more than a synth riff, drum machine rhythm and creeped-out vocal. But within these constrictions, he finds infinite variety, never really sitting still for a second; even as the riff repeats, Jones’ production nous finding little pockets of change where it seemed like there could be none.
Consider I Want To Leave My Body, originally released on Portamento Tracks. There’s almost nothing to it: just bass line, drums and voice. But no two bars are quite the same, as Jones tweaks the effects, volume and his own vocal to allow the track to build and fall back. (I was going to say “relax”. But I Want To Leave My Body does nothing of the sort.). It helps that each element is perfect - the drum machine beat swung just so; the bass line hypnotic, funky and strange, its oddball contours never landing where you might expect.
Jones’ vocal, however, is the absolute highlight of this - and many other - Green Velvet tracks. His early productions as Cajmere often featured vocal turns from the likes of Nané and (especially) Dajae. Green Velvet - the name apparently inspired by an off-the-cuff suggestion by his then girlfriend’s father - was initially an outlet for his non-vocal productions. “When I’m doing Cajmere it’s coming from the house roots and that’s all based in disco and gospel… it’s more inspirational and uplifting,” he told Mookid Music. “When I do Green Velvet I’m coming from an industrial lane.”
Sure enough, the initial Green Velvet songs, Velvet Tracks’ The Preacher Man, Conniption, Off The Hook and They Came From Outer Space, don’t feature traditional vocals. The Preacher Man samples Chicago’s Reverend Trotter, sermonising about young people sleeping around, while the other three tracks are instrumental Chicago house of the toughest, strangest and most addictive kind, the kind of tracks that sound like they were an absolute riot to make, bouncing stupid noises around in the studio until genius emerges. (Percolator, Cajmere’s 1992 hit, could very much have been a Green Velvet tune, by these criteria.)
With 1995’s Portamento Tracks, however, things changed. I’ve mentioned that Jones said pretty much all he needed to say as Green Velvet in his first four records. But, if you want to be even more specific, it was basically all there on Portamento Tracks, a fearsome, fabulous four track EP for Jones’ own Relief Records.
I Want To Leave My Body features a distorted, distended and rather dead-eyed vocal, the monster under your bed gone psychotomimetic, in which Jones endlessly repeats that “sometimes I want to leave my body…. and float away into space…. and float away from this place”, like the terrifyingly psychedelic ending to 2001: A Space Odyssey made dance flesh, his curious intonation and unlikely vocal strains underlining the song’s profoundly alien appeal.
(You Don't Have To Be) Fake And Phoney is a throwback - but an excellent one - to Velvet Tracks, with a sampled voice proclaiming the track title over a rubbery, menacing acid groove. Explorer is even harder, a twisted, barely comprehensible voice talking menacing nonsense over electro-static effects and diamond-tipped drum machine hits, the kind of nightmare you just can’t look away from.
Flash, the record’s final track, would soon become iconic. Jones called it “chatter” in his Mookid Music interview. “I’ll just talk about stuff,” he said, “like Flash was a song I did totally off the top of my head, one take in the studio, recorded it straight to DAT, it just came…” What came was a tale of “bad little kids doin’ bad little things” down Club Bad, from sucking on balloons of nitrous oxide to smoking joints and bringing in their own booze.
If that sounds a little tame, well, it is and it isn’t. Talking to XLR8R in 2007, Jones said the song was inspired by the 90s rave scene. “I was seeing some stuff that was not right at the parties - bad little kiddies doing bad little things,” he said. “I came from the school of it being all about the music and then I started seeing the drug element creep into it.”
But that’s “not right”, rather than outright wrong, an important distinction to make. I wonder, too, if Jones is being influenced here by his decision to become a born-again Christian in the mid 2000s after overdosing on cannabis, magic mushrooms and (allegedly) GHB. Certainly, Jones doesn’t sound entirely disapproving in the song: there’s enough ambiguity in Flash to make you think that he might be looking down on these kids with a disapproving glare, he might be mocking the media’s pompous attitude towards raves or he might, perhaps, be doing a little of each, an impression underlined by Jones’ arch, exaggerated tone.
Besides, whatever Jones might be actually saying in the song, the production on Flash makes Club Bad feel like it might be the most incredible place ever invented. The song resides on a skeletal, syncopated and entirely messed up drum machine beat that wobbles around like Plastikman’s Spastik infected by gangrene, supported by just enough undulating bass to make you think you might be genuinely losing your mind. The drums build and build until - in one of the most thrilling moments in all dance music - Velvet announces “The camera’s ready; prepare the flash” and snare drum hits burst upon the mix, flashing like the cameras announced in the chorus.
It is a sensational, heart-racing effect, simple, dramatic and very clever. And it makes your heart yearn to be among the bad little kids of Club Bad. Has anyone ever captured the illicit thrill of clubbing, where you know things are just a little bit wrong but you revel in them anyway, as well as Velvet does on Flash? I don’t think so. Naturally, the song reached number 1 on the Billboard Dance Club Songs chart.
But if the Velvet of Flash was at least potentially ambiguous about all the naughty things going on in Club Bad, the character that emerged on The Stalker, his next single, was unambiguously to be avoided at all costs. Over a tremulous bass line and unremittingly hard drum line, Velvet recounts a story of utterly unsettling behaviour. “I wanted to get you roses but there were all out / so I got you daisies instead / and dyed them with my blood so that they would be red.” There’s 13 minutes of this depravity and it is quite unlike anything else in dance music, either then or since, the song’s unsettling subject matter cleverly leavened by the vocal’s camp tone and touches of humour.
This humour would come to the fore on Answering Machine, the final track on Velvet’s 1997 EP Destination Unknown. The record’s first three tracks - the neatly clipped funk of Land Of The Lost, the Prince-ish Stormy Weather and the epic tech surge of Destination Unknown, which crackles like a pylon in a storm - are all excellent. But it was Answering Machine that stuck out like a sore thumb, lighting up the clubs with its bizarre sense of humour.
Over a beat that is sparsely tough, even by Velvet’s standards, we are treated to a series of answerphone messages, in which 1) Taniqua tells Velvet she is pregnant; 2) Velvet’s landlord calls to evict him; 3) Bob from the Psychic Friends Network tells our hero that his life is over; 4) LaShaan promises to call Velvet every single day, because she knows he loves her; and, finally, 5) Tyrone calls to tell Velvet that he has slept with Taniqua, every message being greeted with an emphatic, drum-laden “I don’t need this shit!” from Velvet in response. Very few dance music songs are genuinely funny - but Answering Machine is, which might explain why it proved so popular with DJs, despite its cubic beats being tricky to mix.
Did Green Velvet fall off after that? Or did I?
Certainly, Jones did produce some excellent Green Velvet tracks after Answering Machine, including the UK hit single La La Land - number 29 with a bullet - and the excellent 2006 song Shake & Pop.
But for me, the quality was never quite there again. Maybe Velvet had simply said everything he needed to say; or maybe I had heard everything I needed to hear from him. That might sound harsh but it isn’t meant to be. Within those first four records Jones had nailed a unique voice for Green Velvet that was bizarre, threatening, sardonic, funny and utterly out there, a voice that was unlike anyone else’s in dance music, now and then. And he could do it live, too. I remember seeing Velvet DJ at Bugged Out in Manchester in 1997, spitting live vocals over his ultra-tough DJ selection, in what was one of the best sets I had ever seen. Did he really need to do any more?
At the same time, this point was also when I started going out to clubs a lot less often. So maybe I simply lost interest in what Velvet had to say. There’s no concession to home listening or the casual listener in Green Velvet tracks. And that is the way it should be.
What is certain is that later years have seen Velvet collaborate with a raft of producers who, frankly, don’t seem worthy of his talent, including the piss poor CamelPhat and beige house adventurer Patrick Topping. The latter worked with Velvet in 2014 on Voicemail, a woeful update on Answering Machine, in which all the original’s humour and obtuse-angled funk is replaced by sleek tech house smoothery.
Ultimately, I’m glad for where Green Velvet has ended up in 2024. He seems happy to have found God and it feels somehow in keeping with Velvet’s atypical style that he now makes songs about sexual abstinence - his 2005 single No Sex - and the overprescription of drugs (I think) on Genedefekt. Velvet is huge on the international DJ circuit, offering the kind of potential payday that so many of his Chicago peers never reached. Frankly, he deserves it.
Me, though, I will stick to those first four utterly remarkable records, where Green Velvet burst out of the traps and helped to re-define dance music as he did so. What’s bad for my soul may be good for my heart.
Some listening
It is to Mica Levi’s eternal credit that you never know what you’re going to get from one of their records. Slob air sees the artist sign to Hyperdub for a one-off single and then make something that sounds nothing like anything else on the label: 12 and a half minutes of sprawling, airy post rock, like shoegaze with all the guitars turned down. It is gorgeous, moving and utterly hypnotic, with a video that perfectly complements its airs and graces. Slob air might be my favourite thing Levi has done since the Good Sad Happy Bad album Shades in 2020. Summer is here. And talking of which….
Braxe + Falcon & Bibio - All This Love
Braxe + Falcon’s Step By Step EP pretty much was the sound of summer 2022 for me, with its lush French House production set to swelter. And they’ve done it again on All This Love, an immaculate disco house skip with a sneakily downbeat vocal from Bibio and a full-on Duran Duran-on-a-yacht guitar solo just as the song fades to an end. Make 2024 a French House summer.
Jhelisa - Friendly Pressure (Sunship Into The Sunshine 2024)
Given that Sunship’s 1998 Into The Sunshine Mix of Jhelisa’s Friendly Pressure is a UK Garage classic that remains absolutely box fresh today there is pretty much no need for this 2024 update. But the sun’s out, the holidays are nearly here and there is enough new in the update - notably touches of Double 99’s RIP Groove - to warrant its place in your affections.
Things I’ve done
DJ Hell’s history in dance music is incredible. He basically invented trance music, definitely invented electroclash, released his first record in 1992 - and it was a total classic - and has been DJing since 1978. Plus he knows Kraftwerk. It was, as you might imagine, a total pleasure to interview him for Line Noise.
The playlists
“Music,” according to Victor Hugo, “expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent.” The logical extension to this is that my newest and the bestest playlist on Spotify is all the best and newest of that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent from the past three years; and my newest and the bestest 2024 playlist is all the best and newest of that which cannot be put into words etcetera and so on from just this year. Please do follow one or both of them so I don’t have to keep reaching for the quote dictionary every week.