Green Velvet Deep Freezes his House Antics for Optimal Igloofest Binge
His spiky, radioactive green mohawk, that new wave-inspired demeanor, those infectious rhythms, that irreverent sense of humour, those farcical spoken word bits, the many monikers (Green Velvet for techno, non-vocal tracks and DJ gigs; Cajmere for all house output; Curtis Alan Jones for friends & family)… Mr. Jones set off a mighty strong house renaissance in his Chicago hometown back in the ‘90s, with his Cajual Records label, his triumvirate of piping hot singles (“Preacher Man”, “Answering Machine” and “Flash”) and his insistence on taking the piss out of beat pushing – clearly not buying into the etiquette of a certain cerebral, hoity-toity electronic elite.
Whether you think this once-upon chemical engineering student owes more to Gary Numan or Grace Jones is kind of irrelevant. Here, Chicago’s turntable prophet looks back on some of the road traveled and confesses his inner-most feelings about drugs, doctrines, David and Donna.
Your flamboyant, new wave-inspired look allowed you to transcend the mere title of DJ very early on in your career. Who were the performers you looked up to growing up?
My role models were people like Sly Stone, David Bowie, Parliament and Grace Jones. Those people, they’re just characters. They totally inspired and influenced me. I’m totally into being an artist in that way, trying to make sense out of nonsense.
My biggest inspiration comes from a lot of ‘80s music. I would listen to a lot of Parliament and Stevie Wonder. The thing that people don’t realize is that Stevie Wonder used a lot of synthesizers! And then Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer also had really heavy synth sounds…A lot of the stuff from the ‘70s was very electronic sounding to me.
You’ve always amused with those baffling monologues. Where does all the incisive cultural commentary come from?
I have no clue! (laughs) I really don’t. It’s not like I wanted to do it, it just happened. And then people liked it, so I kept going with it and I’ve been doing it ever since.
A lot has been said about your religious epiphany. At one point, you even described your music on MySpace as “techno/funk/Christian”. How has it changed things for you?
For me, it was lifesaving at the time. I was brought up Christian, but when I got into the scene, I got involved in things that I knew at the time I shouldn’t have. But you know, I was curious and experimenting.
The 1995 hit “Flash” was your response to club culture’s shift in focus from the music to the drugs. What can you tell us about the “bad little kiddies doing bad little things” you were alluding to?
The main thing I found troublesome about the mid-nineties rave era was seeing these really young kids, like 13 and 14, doing drugs. I did the song not for the adults who can do whatever they want, but for these kids whose brains haven’t been given a chance to develop. It’s not a good thing, in my opinion. But I’m not a doctor; I’m just an artist!
You struck again with “La La Land” in 2001, as a wake-up call to pill-popping club denizens. Would you agree that you’ve been an advocate of sorts for responsible partying, cleansing filthy basslines with your spoken word wisdom?
Sure! (laughs) For me, when I got into club culture, it really was all about the music. Anybody who got into the music in the ‘80s, they all will say, it was about the music, the scene, the love. That’s how I was introduced to the whole electronic scene. And then along the way, in the mid-90s with the rave culture, things started to shift. It got more about the drug experimentation and all that stuff.
So when I saw that, I made the song “Flash” in 1995, and I did it because I was seeing all these kids doing things [Ed’s note: the song actually talks about “all these bad little kiddies doing bad little things”], but the main thing I found troublesome, was seeing these really young kids, like 13-14, doing drugs, and I was like: ‘this is not cool.’
I remember it wasn’t that prevalent in the beginning of the ‘90s, but all of a sudden the media started to focus on that element from the parties and then it just totally took over. I remember it was on the cover of TIME, and after that all the kids thought you would go to those parties to do drugs. It shifted from being about the music to being about the drugs. I was there to live through it all, and thank God I’m still here and I still have my sanity! (laughs)
Green Velvet performs on January 27 at 10:30 p.m. on Igloofest’s Sapporo main stage, at Jacques-Cartier Pier in the Old Port of Montreal.
Image by Eva Mueller
