NEW EDITION – "Candy Girl"

Yep, those early Jackson Five singles were great weren’t they? NEXT!!

The title struck no chords with me, although when I listened it seemed vguely familiar. I’d have been hard put to date it – although it bears some resemblance to early Jacksons it clearly isn’t them, and the electronic noises rule them out altogether.

More than a minute or so just becomes irritating. Not only can I not remember it being number one, I’m also not in the least surprised I can’t remember. Three from me, no more.

If you like ‘Sensitivity’ check out Lemon Jelly’s ‘Man Like Me’ which samples it to wonderfully hypnotic effect.

Yes, to a UK audience in 1983 this lot were very much sold as ‘the American Musical Youth’. Ridiculous really, as the only thing they had in common was, well, their youth.

This is one of those records I’ve done a 180 degree turnaround over. Hated it at the time. A quarter of a century later it sounds effervescent, sprightly and actually quite fun. It’s also, I’d argue, a landmark record in that it marks the start of the modern boyband era.

This is great, I’m surprised at the lukewarm responses! I can’t remember when I first became aware of it, though that hook is such an integral part of pop history that it’s as if it always existed somewhere in my subconscious. I don’t listen to the og that much and going back to it I was surprised by the squeakiness, which from 2009’s perspective sounds like a foreshadowing of Kanye’s sped-up chipmunk soul samples from a few years ago.

Key tracks which sampled or interpolated the hook: D4L’s terrific “Laffy Taffy” and Trina’s “Kandi” off her Diamond Princess album, which is not on Youtube OR Dailymotion OR Imeem OR Spotify. Internet FAIL. Anyway, it’s great; takes the original and makes it sweeter, pinker, girlier, but Trina will obv never quite leave that undertow of nastiness out. Features a terrific verse from a child by the name of Lil’ Brianna: “10 years old, the baby diva / The kids at school call me Baby Trina”, “I got more flavors than Starburst / I keep my penny candy in my Prada purse / If I act too sassy, pardon me y’all / I be playing with Barbie dolls in Carnegie Hall”.

American here. I think AndyPandy is right that it wasn’t called freestyle originally but I would bet that the tag was applied earlier than the ’90s. There was a group from Miami called Freestyle (aka Freestyle Express) who had club hits in 1984-1986 which is where I assume the name derives from, although today we would call their sound electro. “Latin hip-hop” was the name you heard a lot around 1985-86 for what we know now as freestyle & there may have been other terms floating around before freestyle stuck.

Actually I believe the early freestyle records were indeed made big by the Hispanic culture. It happened at such NYC clubs as the Funhouse, Roseland, the Inferno, the Devil’s Nest, and Heartthrob. The DJ’s pushing electro/freestyle in these places were Hispanic – “Jellybean” Benitez & “Little Louie” Vega among them. Many of the producers were Hispanic, such as Exposé’s Lewis Martinee, The Latin Rascals, Micky Garcia & Elvin Molina, and Ish Ledesma . Countless numbers of the performers were Hispanic as well – Lisa Lisa, Nayobe, Judy Torres, TKA, Sa-Fire, and on & on. The Cover Girls, Exposé, and Sweet Sensation (US version) all had at least one Hispanic member.

Incidentally, The Cover Girls’ producer was called Andy Panda.

Irritating rubbish, I’m afraid. I agreed at the time with the comparisons with Moozical Yoot but realise now that there was very little common ground there. Much more in tandem with dem pesky Jacksons now, I see. In any case, this was a song which surely could only be of interest to girls of fifteen and under. I’d be surprised if this thing cops many postings, to be honest.

The scoring button doesn’t seem to be working for me…

Really surprised at the lack of love, this is such a pop standard!

The Curse of Candy Girl!!!!

Tellingly, when you do a limewire (or whatever) search on ‘candy girl’ you get many hits on ‘Candy girl’ by the Jackson 5. Does anyone know if royalties were paid? This is surely as blatant a recycling as Brian Wilson did with Chuck Berry for ‘Surfin’ USA’. Anyhow, the file-sharers know the truth!

Elsa at 14: yes I take your point and I might be a bit late on the years for “freestyle” being used but I suppose the reason for my post was I’ve found it a bit irritating was the fact that it has been used to describe Shannon’s hits when I’ve downloaded them or read about them in the last few years. And I very much doubt Hispanics put her on the map as they were big hits in the UK as early as late 1983 ie straight away and were definitely viewed as part of the hip-hop/(electro)funk world at the time.

To describe “Let the Music Play” in wiki articles etc as “freestyle” is akin to a group of for example Tokyo youths discovering the Sex Pistols in about 1979 making their own name up for punk and then in the noughties everytime “Pretty Vacant” is mentioned this Japanese name being used as the genre to describe the track…

PS and completely unrelated to the above points wasn’t this track (Maurice Starr notwithstanding)looked on at the time as completely irredeemably shite that only kids of about 10 or 11 bought. Sort of a couple of steps up from Little Jimmy Osmond.

Wasn’t sold at the time – possibly too similar in age to the lads – but now I think it’s awesome. The electrosquelchfunk sounds fantastic played in a club, as I found out from one of the DJs I played alongside at some 80s revival do a few years back.

Wichita at 25: yes but those pompous idiots into Progressive House (not that I’m slagging off Prog House itself) who slagged off Shut Up and Dance were looked on back then by a large proportion of the scene as precisely that ie po-faced gits. ‘5,6,7,8’, ‘£10/20 to get in’, even ‘The Green Man’ were staples of the pirates, the raves and a whole undeground world.

Completely different to ‘Candy Girl’ which really did aim not so much for the lowest comon dominator as for basically a primary school audience (as opposed to the usual mythical 12-16 year old female pop audience…the album even had sort of embarrassing nursey rhyme type things on it according to a horrified 0 star review of it I remember reading at the time- ie 12 or 13 year old boys rather creepily singing stuff more suited to 4 or 5 year olds).

Very little Jackson 5 and even less electro about it…

I love discussions of nomenclature, even if I can’t tell what freestyle has to do with New Edition, except that “Candy Girl” seems to have struck wichitalineman as sounding like Newcleus, if I’m reading him right. Now, I generally wouldn’t associate Newcleus with what people tend to call freestyle, and this is because “Jam On It” doesn’t have the wailing doleful vocals or the style of melodic riffs piling on melodic riffs that make me think “freestyle.” I can’t define the freestyle sound further than that, since there are plenty of nonfreestyle tracks that also have wailing doleful vocals and that pile melodic riffs upon melodic riffs. But those nonfreestyle tracks don’t have wailing freestyle vocals and don’t pile melodic freestyle riffs upon melodic freestyle riffs. (Dept. Of Tautological Tautologies now open for business.)

And though I consider Shannon’s “Give Me Tonight” and “Let The Music Play” to be MAJOR as dance tracks, I think of them as peripheral to the story of freestyle, ’cause again they don’t sound all that freestyle. I think of them as basic electrofied New York club music of the time, similar to “Everybody” and “One More Shot.” But here I may well be wrong; I was still in NY until the mid ’80s, but the clubs I went to were TR3 and A7. So this music existed for me mostly on 12 inch or on the radio, and a lot of it I didn’t catch up with until several years later anyway. But my guess now is that “Let The Music Play” and “Give Me Tonight” are considered freestyle classics not just because they made it onto the Tommy Boy freestyle compilations in the ’90s but because in the ’80s the freestyle audience was taking those songs to heart (though I’m also assuming that those songs were also taken to heart by clubgoers who didn’t go near the freestyle clubs and didn’t know Nayobe from Debbie Deb).

What Newcleus and Shannon and the freestylers have in common is that they all listened hard to Soul Sonic Force’s “Planet Rock” and “Looking For The Perfect Beat.” But then, so did a whole slew of people from New Order to 2 Live Crew.

In response to AndyPandy, I think that – whether you were right or not – you’d have been on reasonable ground if you’d said “I think it stretches the term freestyle too far to apply it to either Newcleus or to Shannon, much less to both, and it confuses history to do so.” But that’s not what you said, and you seemed angrily dogmatic about the history and the terminology without knowing them too well. And in general I agree four-square with Steve’s and Elsa’s and wichitalineman’s responses (well, I have a few quibbles, which I might or might not get around to posting).

I would peg the beginning of “freestyle” with Debbie Deb’s “When I Hear Music” in 1983, produced by Tony Butler, but that’s because (i) I love the song, and (ii) I don’t really know what relevant tracks might have preceded it. E.g., for all I know, Tony Butler released tracks with his band Freestyle before then, or someone else might have released something that inspired Butler (I mean, other than the obvious “Planet Rock,” which helps inspire the beats but not the vocals or the riffs). Anyway, when I started to pay more than passing attention to this stuff in ’87, the genre terms I was seeing were “Miami Sound” and “Latin Hip-Hop,” but almost every 12 inch I saw contained a “freestyle mix,” this usually in addition to a “club mix,” the freestyle mix being longer and tending towards more and busier synthbeats and blips and more electronic manipulation of vocal syllables.

But it’s easy to see why “freestyle” became the umbrella term: “Miami Sound” leaves out New York, whereas “Latin Hip-Hop” not only leaves out all the non-Latinos like Tony Butler and Debbie Deb and half of Sequal and two-thirds of Exposé not to mention all the Italian Americans etc. in the audience, it also overassociates the music with hip-hop, from which Latinos in ’80s New York are feeling more and more estranged (at least according to John Storm Roberts in the second edition of The Latin Tinge they are, though he doesn’t connect this to freestyle; in fact – irritatingly – he doesn’t seem to know of the existence of freestyle).

Which leads to a final point: I get the impression that in the ’80s “electro” was much more a British term than an American – Bambaataa called Soul Sonic Force “electrofunk,” but the term “electro” didn’t have an overall use here. (Again, I could be all wrong about that.) So calling the stuff “electro” now feels wrong, not because the term is retrospective, but because it covers over musical and social tensions: Even though Bambaataa was a prime figure in ’70s New York hip-hop, ’80s New York hip-hop had little use for what he was doing. It was the clubsters and the freestylers who learned from Soul Sonic Force but, after the first wave of electrofunk, not Northern hip-hop. Of course, Miami was a different story, with Miami bass’s embrace of the big boom.

Hated it, then and now. Sorry.

This is a truly dreadful record, though I did still tape it off the radio back in the day. My recollection is that New Edition had no further hits in the UK, but somehow became massive in the States. Leastwise, Bobby somebody was able to establish himself with a solo career on the basis of being That Guy From New Edition.

Quite an annoying, forced song for me.