First it was Skinny Puppy, who were just to hardcore and machinista for the general populace.
Then it was two weeks of Negativland, who were just too damn strange for mass consumption.
Today’s artist has none of these problems. About his only weakness is that he’s just too damn funky.
A white boy who sings like Stevie Wonder and has a band backing him up tighter than The Family Stone, Jamiroquai should have been just hotter than fried grease, but that was not the case. Oh sure, he one hit wondered here in the states, with a minor follow-up track, but the combo was smokin’ and ready for mass production.
Sadly, even with all of his leftist causes detracting from the total points column, he just sort of faded.
Some say overexposure with his one hit. Others say that its because he’s from Down Under.
I don’t know what is to blame, but this guy should have taken the world by storm instead, just like the predictions of hundreds of killer hurricanes, he just sort of went out like a lamb.
I first got a earful of him in 1993 at a local club with his first minor hit
All the Mother Gaia worship you can cram in a 3:47 long funk song and still sound serious about both the topic and the funk.
Damn thing should have killed. Hell, the album was titled Emergency on Planet Earth”. The man had AlGore beat by over a decade!
But the world just wasn’t ready for it and it kind of had a dead cat bounce across the mainstream airwaves.
His second album dropped a year later, and I mean dropped like a lead weight. He went for the “Cheeba Cheeba Space Cowboy Vibe” and no one got it.
Two years of touring and tightening followed and Travelling Without Moving hit the shelves and sat there. For a while. Then the video hit MTV and it was like manna from heaven. Dude was dancing on a moving floor. Or was it that the room was moving? It didn’t matter cause he had that funky, fuzzy hat and he and the band killed at the MTV VMA’s.
Guy was everywhere for six months.
My favorite bit of tunage on the album though was the title track
Not only will it make paraplegics want to get up to get down, but it opens with jay Kay pushing his Lamborghini SE30 Diablo. C’mon, you gots to love that sound. Though the hypocrisy of 9mpg vs. his love of Gaia I can leave behind.
Then nowhere. Massive tour schedule and then Syncronized came to the stores. It sold well, but didn’t take off until Napoleon Dynomite tried to get people to Vote For Pedro.
Bang!
Three more albums have followed with some pretty decent club hits, but no more mainstream attention as of yet, which is too bad.
Still, it makes it so much easier to I can drop dude’s albums on folks who don’t know yet and they get their minds blown.
Enjoy!