Skip to main content
Eddie Rockerz VibeZ - curated playlists, mixes and music commentary

Dig the crates

Every playlist on the blog, sorted by where it takes you.

Browse all 600+ VibeZ

DJ Mixes & Series

The house sets, the Producer Series and the running volumes.

Show all 16Show fewer

G.Q VibeZ

Eight tracks from a New York band who had one enormous 1979 hit, a long apprenticeship before it, and a catalogue that deserves better than one song.

GQ-700

G.Q.

G.Q. are remembered, when they are remembered, for "Disco Nights (Rock Freak)". What that reputation obscures is that they were a working band with years of history behind them: they had recorded through the mid-seventies as The Rhythm Makers, and that earlier catalogue has been mined by crate-diggers and hip-hop producers ever since.

The lineup was built around Emanuel Rahiem LeBlanc, Keith Crier, Herb Lane and Paul Service, and they played their own instruments, which by 1979 was already becoming unusual in dance music. That matters to how the records sound: there is a looseness in the rhythm section that programmed disco does not have.

They also sang properly, in close harmony, which is why the ballads on this short set are considerably better than the hit-single reputation suggests.

What to listen for

"Disco Nights (Rock Freak)" in the twelve-inch mix is the essential track — and listen to the guitar, which is doing something closer to funk than to disco, and to the bass, which is clearly being played rather than sequenced.

"Standing Ovation" is the second-best record here and the one the connoisseurs prefer, with a groove that is harder and dirtier than the hit.

"I Do Love You" is the ballad, a reading of the Billy Stewart song, and it is where the vocal group really announces itself.

"Make My Dreams a Reality" and "Don't Stop This Feeling" are the album cuts, and both are stronger than their obscurity implies.

"Boogie Oogie Oogie" in their twelve-inch version is the A Taste of Honey cover, and it is a good demonstration of how a band with real players changes a record built on a bassline.

"Sitting In the Park" and "Sad Girl" are the sweetest things here and the reason to keep the set rather than just the single.

Go deeper

Disco Nights (1979) is the album, and Standing Ovation: The Story of GQ and The Rhythm Makers is the compilation that tells the whole story properly.

The Rhythm Makers' own recordings are worth seeking out. For the wider world of bands who played disco rather than programming it: Slave, Instant Funk, Brass Construction and B.T. Express.

Listening note: they played their instruments, which by 1979 was already becoming unusual in dance music, and it is audible in the looseness of the rhythm section. Programmed disco locks; this breathes. The ballads are the other reason to keep the set — they were a harmony group first, and the single obscures it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Monty Alexander VibeZ

There is a moment on almost every Monty Alexander record where the jazz piano trio stops behaving like a jazz piano trio and starts behaving like a Kingston sound system. That moment is the whole point. Fifty tracks deep, this is the sound of a man who never asked permission to be two things at once. The pianist who brought Kingston to the Carnegie stage Monty Alexander was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1944, and by his teens he was already gigging around the island — close enough to the birth of ska and rocksteady to have absorbed it in his bones rather than learned it from records. He moved to the United States in 1961, and the origin story that follows is the kind that sounds invented: Frank Sinatra heard him playing in a Miami club, and Jilly Rizzo, Sinatra's friend and club owner, put him behind the piano at Jilly's in New York. From there Alexander fell in with Milt Jackson and Ray Brown, two of the most demanding rhythm partners in the music, and never really ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kashif VibeZ

Kashif is the reason a lot of 1980s R&B sounds the way it does — and the reason you can hear the difference between a synth bassline played by someone who understood bass and one programmed by someone who didn't. This is a producer's playlist, and the producer is everywhere. The architect of the synthesized soul record Kashif was born Michael Jones in Brooklyn in 1956, raised in foster care, and taught himself music young enough that by his teens he was touring with B.T. Express. What he did next reshaped a decade. In the early 1980s, as a producer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist, he was among the first to build R&B records around programmed synthesizers — the Minimoog bass, the Linn drum machine, the Fairlight — without letting them sound cold. That distinction matters. Plenty of producers adopted the new gear; Kashif made it groove . His basslines are played with the phrasing of a funk bassist, full of slides and ghost notes, which is why rec...
Post a Comment
Read more

De La Soul VibeZ (R.I.P Trugoy the Dove)

Trugoy the Dove died in February 2023, weeks before De La Soul's catalogue finally reached streaming after a fifteen-year legal deadlock. Thirty-one tracks, and a difficult kind of timing. Rest in peace, Dave David Jude Jolicoeur — Trugoy the Dove, later just Dave — formed De La Soul in Amityville, Long Island with Posdnuos and Maseo. Their 1989 debut 3 Feet High and Rising , produced with Prince Paul , remains one of the most inventive records in the history of the genre: dense with samples from Steely Dan to Johnny Cash to French language instruction tapes, funny, formally strange, and entirely uninterested in the postures rap was expected to strike. The consequence of that invention was a curse. The sample clearance landscape changed after Gilbert O'Sullivan sued Biz Markie in 1991, and De La Soul's early catalogue — built on hundreds of uncleared fragments — became legally impossible to license. For roughly fifteen years, their most important a...
Post a Comment
Read more