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Jody Watley Classic Image of The Week

#TBT Japanese Fashion Magazine Launch Cover.

Breaking barriers as first black woman on Japanese fashion magazine, there were billboards across Japan and I also filmed a television commercial that aired through the country – such an honor. Photography: Philip Dixon. Makeup: Paul Starr. Wardrobe: Martin Sitbon

Jody Watley – Wattage.

Jody Watley Photo Of The Day with Eartha Kitt

With the phenomenal and incomparable Eartha Kitt – respect and honor today on her born day and always.

Definitely was incredible to meet her in the 90’s on VH1’s The Rupaul Show.

Jody Watley Dance To Fitness. A Milestone Classic Photo Of The Day

If there is no opportunity or representation-create it. Flashback to 1990 – “Dance to Fitness” which went on to become a number one fitness million selling video – “I wanted to do this because there were no videos by women of color in the health and fitness market..it was time and my music is perfect for it.”

Of the many business and marketing ideas (clothing line, cosmetic endorsements, a signature perfume) I had back then, this is one that actually came to fruition.

Another reason I’m so happy for Rihanna with her endeavors – the times often dictate and the door is opened a bit wider each generation.

Jody Watley Honoree 2017 Black Music Honors

Read about it on UrbanBridgez

Jody Watley Classic Photo of The Day. LAEyeworks.

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Jody Watley Interview V Magazine Summer Issue 2014

© 2014 Jody Watley - #selfie

© 2014 Jody Watley –  V Magazine #selfie

 

 

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Article:

THE IRREPRESSIBLE JODY WATLEY RETURNS WITH A BRAND NEW ALBUM THAT HARKS BACK TO HER FUNK SOUL ROOTS. HERE, THE SINGER REFLECTS ON HER RISE TO THE TOP, WORKING WITH THE WORLD’S GREATEST FASHION PHOTOGRAPHERS AND STAYING TRUE.

Jody Watley at Giorgio’s the exclusive, the exclusive Saturday party at The Standard in Hollywood, where Mick Jagger and Andre Harrell mix and David LaChapelle might be spotted with Daphne Guiness on his lap. Watley is the queen of the venue-she holds court almost every week just past DJ Adam XII’s booth with her friend and Decades cofounder Christos Garkinos. Tonight, the mother of two a self described basketball mom, carpool mom, fabulous mom..” wears all black save for a pair of crystal Jimmy Choo pumps. When she’s in the mood, she’ll fan herself on the dance floor-something she has done since beginning her career as a dancer on Soul Train as a teenager. “I always have my little fan action.” the icon says with a smile. “It’s so glamourous. Eat your heart out Karl Lagerfeld.” Watley shot the video for “Nightlife”, the clubby lead single off her new album “Paradise”, at Giorgio’s.  “I want to inspire people, because people get stuck in a rut.” she says of the music. “Oh, I’m not going out, Oh, the good ole’ days..” And it’s so frustrating. It’s like make new memories! Even if you had a great time ten, twenty, thirty years ago, be fabulous now! You’re alive, Hello!”

The daughter of a Chicago minister, Watley first performed onstage as a child with her godfather, the incredible crooner Jackie Wilson. After relocating to Los Angeles she succeeded in her mission to become a Soul Train regular. In 1977, Don Cornelius the show’s creator and host, selected her to become an original member of the disco super trio-Shalamar, which would record world-class dance-floor anthems like “The Second Time Around” and “A Night To Remember.” Watley left the group after six years, loved to London, and recorded “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” with Band Aid.

After returning to Los Angeles three years later, she signed with MCA Records and released her 1987 solo album “Jody Watley”, co-writing a handful of tracks. It contains some of her most enduring dance music, including the lead single “Looking For A New Love” (which features the popular pre Terminator 2 kiss-off “Hasta la vista baby!”). “Don’t You Want Me.” and “Some Kind of Lover.” She accepted her 1988 “Best New Artist” Grammy-winning over Breakfast Club, Cutting Crew, Swing Out Sister and Terence Trent D’Arby – in a vintage dress and biker jacket painted with her likeness.

‘When I signed to MCA, I didn’t see anybody like who I wanted to be.” she says. “I wanted to do that badass fashion chick that’s just different. And not everybody likes her. And not everybody liked me. “You don’t smile, you’re a black girl, you’re glamorous and you’ve got this cold as ice stare.” While in London she sought out designers like Azzedine Alaia, Claude Montana, Vivienne Westwood, and Jean Paul-Gaultier. “I bought one of the first cone bra’s, pre-Madonna. It’s on the single sleeve of “Don’t You Want Me”. I also bought the huge one that she ended up wearing, but the understated one was more me”, she says.

With her gorgeous mane, lean frame, stunning brows illegal cheekbones and ballsy attitude Watley was the perfect subject for fashion’s top photographers.”[When I first started] the label didn’t want to fly me to New York for my first layout for Harper’s Bazaar” she laughs. “So I flew myself out to shoot with Scavullo!” Steven Meisel photographed the cover of her 1989 follow-up album Larger Than Life. The video for ‘Real Love’ was directed by David Fincher and featured her ruling the runway in menswear paving the way for future acts like Aaliyah and TLC.

“I never wanted to be like anybody else” says Watley who, in the decades that followed never stopped recording, performing and changing up her style and sound. Now she’s writing a memoir, which she plans to finish this year.  “I can only be who I am. Because to me that’s what street is. Street is real.” – Mark Jacobs

 

My blog about the photo used in the piece: Here

 

Music Maverick Jody Watley In Wax Poetics Issue 57

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“Not everyone fits in with the mainstream. Some are born to be different. They are misfits, individualists, outsiders, and eccentrics that let their freak flags fly. Yet they have found a way to thrive on their own terms, transcending barriers of categorical concepts and popular expectations.” Read the article: Wax Poetics

Buy the issue on newsstands now.

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Issue 57 Wax Poetics featuring cover girls Janelle Monae and Jody Watley

Jody Watley Nightlife Bio by Ernest Hardy.

 

Jody Watley (c) 2013

Jody Watley (c) 2013 #selfie “Nightlife.

As quiet as it’s sometimes kept, Grammy award winning artist Jody Watley has been at the forefront of some of the most groundbreaking trends and movements in modern pop culture – political statements, music and music video innovation, and the place where all those tracks meet. Check just a fragment of her résumé:

The video for her classic 1987 song “Still a Thrill” (from her Grammy-winning eponymous debut album of that same year) dazzlingly incorporates waacking, the underground freestyle dance (think of it as an even more beat-driven cousin to voguing), and is the first time a major pop star used their artistic platform to showcase this particular means of body expression. But Ms. Watley had actually brought the dance to widespread American attention a few years earlier as a teenage dancer on the iconic TV show Soul Train. Now, waacking has fans and practitioners around the globe, many of whom use the music of Ms. Watley in their routines as a show of respect for an OG who’s kept the flame burning.

Her groundbreaking 1989 cut “Friends” carved the template for both R&B/hip-hop and pop/hip-hop fusions to come, as it was the first time a rapper (the legendary Rakim, of Eric B. & Rakim) wrote original verses for an R&B/pop song.

The video for “Friends” was a landmark of subversive/progressive representation that has still not yet been matched – or given its due as a taboo-shattering cultural artifact. Set in an underground New York dance club, and featuring performances by Miss Watley and Eric B. & Rakim, the club’s denizens are made of up straight, gay, and transgender folk, of all races, body shapes and sartorial aesthetics. B-boys jostle alongside drag queens, Rakim rocks the mic, and Jody serves face and fierceness. It’s a warm utopian vibe. The gathering is organic, and lacks the opportunistic marketing tactic of gay-friendly advocacy that is now on trend for pop divas.

Long before making his mark as a film director, David Fincher (Se7en; Fight Club) cut his stylistic teeth on Miss Watley’s sleek, hugely influential music video for the 1989 smash “Real Love,” perfecting a signature visual look that he would later impart to other pop divas.

Unhappy with the constraints of being on a major label, she parted ways with her industry home and started her own label Avitone Recordings in 1995. Through it she has released four critically acclaimed CDs (Affection, 1995; The Saturday Night Experience, 1999; Midnight Lounge, 2001; The Makeover, 2006) which have collectively spanned the genres electronica, ambient, R&B, and House. They’ve also reinforced her roots in and solidified her ties to the global dance underground, as everyone from 4Hero and King Britt to Masters at Work and Junior Vasquez jumped at the chance to work on these projects.

A fashion-forward visionary from her Soul Train days, Ms. Watley never used a professional stylist but, as a solo artist with a singular vision and keen instincts, carved her own look by weaving vintage clothing and contemporary street fashions from her own closet with high-end pieces from fashion designers who hadn’t yet caught the public or industry eye (Jean-Paul Gautier; Rifat Ozbek.) Photographers from the legendary Francesco Scavullo to firebrand Steven Meisel lined up to work with her. For her iconoclastic and influential eye, she was honored with a feature in VOGUE Italia’s groundbreaking “Black Issue” in 2008.

 

But that was all then. “NIGHTLIFE” is now.

 

“Nightlife,” lushly co-produced by Ms. Watley and rising hot production team Count De Money, is a horn-laced, bass-driven, beat-pumping call to glamorous arms. It’s an anthem of uplift and inspiration where the dance-floor is a designated refuge of self-creation and spirit preservation. On one hand, the track celebrates dance music tradition, its classic sounds and motifs (nodding to disco, House, soulful R&B,) while looking squarely to the future. As an artistic statement, it’s a perfect encapsulation of Ms. Watley’s career thus far: This is where I’ve been / this is what I’ve done / this is where I am and what I’m doing right now / this is how I’m mapping the future.

When asked what inspired the song, she cites old-school classics like McFadden & Whitehead’s “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now,” and the O’Jays’ “Message in Our Music.”

“Those were songs that made you dance but made you feel inspired,” she says. “It really started from there. I wanted to hear music like that so I had to write it because I haven’t heard anything like that from anyone else in a long time. All my songs start with what I’m feeling and what I want other people to get from it. There’s a strength that resonates through [“Nightlife”] just the same – but in a totally different way – as my first solo single, ‘Looking for a New Love.’ I want people to feel great because things in the world aren’t great and we need sources of strength and inspiration, someplace to go to feel good about ourselves no matter what else is going on in the world.”

As one third of the seminal R&B/pop trio Shalamar, whose rich, distinctive harmonies propelled the group to stardom, Ms. Watley was the femme anchor for what was so unique a sonic blast that the British music press coined the term “the Shalamar sound.” But the classic Shalamar sound actually had two acts. The second was the one most people are familiar with, but the first featured the underrated Gerald Brown before he left the group. (He’s the one singing co-lead on the group’s first mainstream hit “Take That to The Bank.”) “Nightlife” is a reunion of old friends as Gerald joins Jody to sing the song’s catchy hook, “It’s in the music…,” which has its own story behind it.

“Well, the hook is something that came about because I performed the song for about two years before recording it,” explains Jody with a smile. “I’ve been opening my show with it for a little while now, and it’s really grown and taken shape organically. If I’d recorded the song when it first came to me, it would be missing so much of what’s there now because a lot of elements slowly kicked into place. One of those is the line, ‘It’s in the music.’ As time went by I just started hearing it in my head. I had been listening to Change, “Glow of Love,” some Shalamar, and Phyllis Hyman, “You Know How to Love Me,” and it just hit me – It’s in the music. And I was like, ‘That needs to be the tagline for the song.’ I recorded it first and then I thought, ‘I’m hearing a male voice alongside my voice for the first time in forever.’ [Laughter] So then I got Gerald Brown to add his voice with mine, and that provided the element I felt that line deserved.”

Driven by a career-best vocal performance, “Nightlife” is the kind of multi-purpose dance anthem you listen to while getting dressed for the club, and then lose your mind to when it comes blasting through club speakers. And it pays homage to both Ms. Watley’s dance roots and her embrace of the here and now as it pulls the thread of waacking into its grooves, with the diva commanding, “Waack it / just waack it out…” Her love for the form has everything to do with her love of freestyle dancing.

“When I say ‘I’m gonna waack it, gonna waack it out / now turn, turn and walk it out…’ I’m visualizing people listening to it,” she smiles, “even if they don’t know what waacking it out is. They know it means to do something and to have fun with it, and then walk it out. That’s the spirit, embracing the freedom and the rhythm of the music. I think that element of my dancer background is always in my music – even with the ambient and mellower things. The groove has to hit you just like the lyrics. It has to all come together.

“Waacking, I’ve been doing since I was a teenager on Soul Train. It’s showing the music because you’re hitting the accents, and that can be any range of movement. It can be kicking your leg. It can be hitting a pose where it’s a fashion pose, or hitting a pose where it’s just you falling to the ground and hitting a beat, whereas voguing is more fashion poses specifically. Waacking is about showing the music, hitting beats. I love it because it’s freeing and fun. It lets you hear music in a different way. You’re not just dancing to the song; you’re listening for specific elements – like a bass-line, or a lyric line that makes you go boom-boom. It makes you see the music by movement.”

A thumping preview of the forthcoming EP Paradise (due in early 2014,) “Nightlife” has already garnered acclaim from both longtime fans and tastemakers like the Okayplayer website, who praised it as “born to rip the runway…” Those reactions are cool validation for a sense of purpose and integrity that hasn’t always been understood by industry types, but that is at the core of Ms. Watley’s relationship with her music, her fans, and herself.

“Everything I’ve ever done has been to be distinctively Jody Watley,” she says thoughtfully, “from my first solo album through right now. Everything that I will ever do always has to be authentic to me, work that I can always be proud of first and foremost. It’s not so much about, ‘Oh, this is going to be popular,’ or ‘Oh, this is going to be a big hit.’ It’s always been so personal to me, everything that I do. And the fans can feel that. They connect with the honesty.”

Jody Watley Loves The Nightlife. Soulbounce.

Soulbounce

The word “diva” is being thrown around like confetti these days with few female artists actually living up to the definition. But there are some talents who are living and breathing examples of diva-dom, such as Jody Watley who has paid her dues and earned the title…Read the full post: HERE