the woman behind the 'superwoman'

sometimes, you discover artists that no one else seems to know about. one day, in my german class at school, we had to name our favourite artist. it was 1990 so the most popular answers, and most acceptable if you wanted to escape the scorn of your peers, were 'soul ii soul' or 'de la soul'. and so it went, all around the room. it must have been riveting for the teacher, although he used to play a banjo, so its likely every response was alien to him.

several brave souls ventured 'new kids on the block' (shouldn't admit to that one) and 'madonna' (so passe by 1990) and a couple of geeks, keen to display 'underground' music knowledge, smugly named some obscure 60s bands and impressed no one. then someone said 'karyn white' and the room fell silent. i didn't have the inclination to let the rest of the class know that i also knew and liked karyn white, i just listened to the person's explanation with interest. 'you know, she did that song 'superwoman' but the rest of her stuff is nothing like that. oh, i don't know...she's kind of like janet jackson'. fair enough.

karyn, was a young vocalist in the powerhouse tradition who worked with la and babyface and also jam and lewis over the course of her career, and married terry lewis in 1992. she was a session singer discovered by jazz fusion artist jeff lorber in 1986. he asked her to sing lead on two tracks for his new project 'private passion' that was to feature soul vocalists singing over his jazz-funk compositions. 'facts of love' and 'true confessions' proved the perfect showcase for karyn's talent and paved the way for a solo deal.

my classmate was right. karyn's eponymous debut in 1988 in a way, did fill the gap between janet's 'control' and 'rhythm nation 1814' albums. most people remember it for enduring ballad, 'superwoman', a staple of easy listening radio playlists to this day. but the truth is that the album was far less pop and more classic r&b than that song would suggest, or that janet would have attempted herself.

the singles released from 'karyn white' were far more ubiquitous in the US, who were switched on to r&b far earlier than the UK where it remained a specialist genre, or subgenre of dance, until the late 90s. nevertheless, they did ok over here and I can remember her second album and lead single 'romantic' being greeted enthusiastically on tv-am. both a blessing and a curse.

'ritual of love' was handily split into a 'dance me' side and 'romance me' side, if you bought the cassette. which a lot of people still did in those days. this concept has been nicked by many other artists, especially for their greatest hits albums. with her third album 'make him do right', karyn continued to have moderate success but never really broke through.

over the years, sharing flats and cd collections, precious few people have ever heard of karyn white. but they all remember 'superwoman'. aaargh! don't get me wrong, i love the song but it was an obvious hit and a calculated move, not what she should be remembered for.

ten karyn white songs that I prefer to 'superwoman' - download here

facts of love
music by jeff lorber, vocals by karyn white. this track introduced the world to her talents, at the age of 20.

the way you love me
listen about halfway through - did karyn pioneer the speed-singing style destiny's child and wyclef claimed to invent on 'no no no'? beyonce....you never learn do you?

secret rendezvous
should have been much bigger than it was, this was late 80s syncopated r&b at its best. one for the bedroom and the dancefloor.

don't mess with me
out-sassing control-era janet was always going to be tricky, but karyn has the vocals and attitude to pull it off.

family man
karyn finds out her man has a wife and kids at home. she won't be the last...and this is the way to deal with it.

not thru being with you
in between her first two albums, karyn hooked up with michael jeffries for this uptempo club smash.

romantic
remix of one of her biggest hits, the first single from second album 'ritual of love'. less percussion, more bass.

the way i feel about you
remix of the other big hit from 'ritual of love'. should have been the start of bigger things.

how i want you
one of many great slow jams from 'ritual of love'. worthy of a place on any 90s 'do me baby' playlist.

one heart

sweet ballad that stays just the right side of saccharine. probably written with terry lewis in mind...shame it didn't work out.

dick in a box

you've all seen the saturday night live sketch where trousersnake parodies early 90s slow jams and, well, himself actually, if his hit rate is to be believed. maybe his moves are more sophisticated now, but I bet preteen justin listened and learned. janet jackson, scarlett johansson, emma bunton, cameron diaz, beyonce, britney, christina, alyssa milano, that dancer..countless others...they all fell for it.

in 1991, color me badd started something. three years after george michael's 'i want your sex' was banned, songs about sex hit the charts so fast that the regulators just gave up, it seems. la tour's 'people are still having sex', salt-n-pepa's 'let's talk about sex' and the divinyls' 'i touch myself' were successful but they didn't respectively alter the output of house, hiphop and rock in the way that 'i wanna sex you up' achieved.

until then new jack swing was mostly slickly produced, frenetic workouts requiring the running man dance, which was never going to work as foreplay really, was it? thus, bedroom music was, if not born, kicked into the 90s and made saucier than ever.

color me badd never quite replicated the success of their first single, mostly because all of their other songs were shit. they started to overdo the foreplay and lost the sleaze, by appearing in magazines gushing about how they loved to stroke a woman's hair, buy her roses and chocolates, before getting her into bed.

no woman on earth was gonna fall for that. but we do have them to thank for 90s slow jams and probably a lot of kids now aged about 15 or 16...

ten rude songs with which to woo your 90s lover - download here

color me badd - i wanna sex you up
obviously. I prefer the new jack city version not the way too obvious 'let me take off all your clothes...'. cos that was the one we used to sing in classes run by ageing substitute teachers, leading them to denounce us as 'devil children'. lol. no, i didn't go to a convent.

r.kelly - your body's calling
I was alarmed when my then five year old cousin named r.kelly as his favourite singer. turned out he'd only heard 'i believe I can fly' and 'gotham city'. phew! i was so not gonna be buying him '12 play' for christmas.

kut klose - I like
I really like this song. and they do that popular mid 90s girl group 'ohyeaheehyeahahahyeahyeah' bit in the chorus. oh you know what i mean... kut klose were keith sweat's girl group and they had some great slow jams on their one and only album.

changing faces - keep it right there
nice remix by creepy devante of jodeci. changing faces improved over time from their awful debut 'stroke you up' to 2000's great 'that other woman'.

jodeci - freek'n'you
later jodeci track bumped in every clapped out boy racer in london at some point in 1996. thanks to condition of said cars, it rarely had the desired effect on the ladies, sadly, and they looked a bit er, gay.

aaliyah - age ain't nothin' but a number
except it is when you're 14, from a legal standpoint. try to ignore that fact and enjoy babygirl's cooing vocals.

1-900 - oh
forgotten new jack swing slowie with a nice color me badd style beat. so obscure i couldn't find a picture of them.

adina howard - freak like me
the sugababes cover used an 80s electro classic and was coolly clever, but dropped the sleaziness of the original like a hot potato. which was half the point.

silk - freak me
another level's later cover version sounds impressively copycat given that they're essex boys. but the original beats out dane bowers and co any day, for those that know.

swv - downtown
if you can't work this song out you're not old enough to be reading this. swv, along with mary j blige, inspired many of today's r&b acts.

the uk's answer to the jackson five...??

five star - a family r&b group comprising five siblings - were touted as the uk's answer to the jackson five. in 1985. come on, back then there was definitely a delayed reaction as we responded to musical and cultural missives from across the atlantic, but 16 years?

deniece, doris, lorraine, delroy and steadman were just teenagers when they burst onto the scene in 1984 with their brassy bleached hair (the girls) and jheri curls (the boys). plus braces all round. their first single, problematic, failed to make an impression despite landing the plum performance spot on pebble mill at one. actually maybe that was the problem...

before they enjoyed chart success and proved the old adage that money can't buy taste, five star, despite their tender ages (ranging from 14 to 21) produced classic 80s brit soul a la loose ends. seriously, that good. they had their own label, tent records, and ok, like the jackson five and later beyonce, their dad, buster pearson, was pulling the strings.

the obvious family schtick aside, their careers took off because deniece had a great voice. the others found roles for themselves beyond backup, 'why don't you' style. delroy was the, er, baby. (actually this is sounding more like the spice girls). steadman was the oldest and 'looked a bit like michael jackson'. doris was the choreographer and 'looked a bit like janet jackson'. lorraine, brainwashed by blue peter, felt compelled to make mock ups of their video sets out of old cardboard boxes. and dated eddie murphy, briefly. you can decide which of these achievements is greater.

so their first album, 'luxury of life' was a triumph of slinky mid 80s electro soul replete with bubbling basslines, sweet vocals and summery instrumentation. so much so that an unprecedented seven singles were released, with moderate success right up until the last one, a song about being mechanically manipulated - 'system addict'. someone in a&r (probably buster) had finally noticed that in 1985, we were obsessed with futuristic gadgetry and convinced that by the year 2000, computers would rule the world.

but soon they were bonafide popstars and commerciality struck resulting in the music becoming more hit and miss quality-wise. they bought more cars than their romford home could accommodate and started wearing matching catsuits. yep, including the boys.

so, if you're too young to remember what they looked like, don't look too closely at the image at the top of this page. it'll only put you off, just listen to the music...

ten five star tracks you need to own - download here

hide and seek
lots of people think this is a new edition song that five star covered - in fact its the other way round. this was their first proper single and the dancing in the video is hilarious....

let me be the one
the five star track most likely to be mis-labelled as loose ends if you try to download it from limewire.

all fall down
a big hit stateside and a popular choice to accompany majorettes (remember wanting to be one of those?) and aerobics classes nationwide.

love take over
hmmm. either five star's music videos are intended to have nothing to do with the song or there is a genius undercover message that I can't decipher. five star gatecrash an empty country house and prance about.

find the time
actually, I seem to remember the video for this track had lots of clocks in it, cos of the time thing. there goes my last theory.

if i say yes
another upbeat track that I didn't appreciate at the time. I think partly because in the video they wore awful oversized grey suits and pranced about a haunted house.

show me what you got for me
best track on their second and most successful album, 'silk and steel'. perhaps because as a non-single, it was not sullied by live performances in matching shoulder padded frightsuits with a dance routine in which poor delroy looked increasingly unwieldy, what with him being in the throes of puberty and all.

whenever you're ready
the first single from 1987's 'between the lines' album. more polished, but still good with nice bubbly sound effects.

strong as steel
a great slow jam from 1987 that has been covered by gladys knight amongst others.

rock my world
from their last commercially successful album in the UK, 'rock the world'. different again, but worth a spin.

miss jackson if you're nasty

ok, let's get this out of the way first. janet jackson is not the best singer in the industry. but the standard appears to have now been set by artists who employ rampant melisma and the technically brilliant yet incredibly unappealing christina aguilera.

janet's breakthrough was in 1986 with the 'control' album produced by jimmy jam and terry lewis, previously members of prince's group, flyte time. no vocal gymnastics necessary, this album was anchored by janet's confident delivery and the precedent set by electro funk/soul such as shannon's 'let the music play' and cherrelle's 'i didn't mean to turn you on'.

the album was short - 8 tracks - but it was a crash course in being a young woman in 1986 and beyond. female assertion at a time when destiny's child were trying to colour inside the lines at elementary school (subject to age verification, cough). janet instructed young girls to take control, cut family ties, kick your boyfriend into touch and make him wait for it.

these were ideas that resonated with my pre-teen group, and even more so with the teenage community, who appreciated further reinforcement of the guidance from girls' magazines like just seventeen and mizz on dealing with sex. in 1986, the media didn't dare portray 12 year old girls getting pregnant and carrying on happily with their lives in the way coronation street and eastenders would have us believe is possible in recent years. they put out messages about safe sex and waiting until you were older, because society had a spiralling aids epidemic to combat before it even dealt with teenage mums. janet, in her own way, made it cool to say no.

hmm. twenty years ago, no one went online to find that 21 year old janet was in the process of divorcing first husband james debarge, whom she had married at 18. i've listened to the 'control' album differently since the 2005 claims that they in fact had a baby during their short marriage. back then, you got your info from magazines like smash hits and the one-off interview with parky or terry wogan, and so precious few people even realised she had been married.

of course, its entirely possible that some of the bitterness and icy resolve that made 'control' such a great album was a reflection of the fact that janet's first two albums, released in 1982 and 1984, flopped. actually they contained some great tracks but failed to inspire, the first merely reflecting the waning disco sound and the second lyrically damper but equally funky as 'control', let down by an ill-advised duet with cliff richard. yes, that's cliff richard.

by the time janet followed up her successs with 'rhythm nation 1814' in 1989, social consciousness was the order of the day and this album's title track remains the only credible plea for unity to date. almost making up for several self-indulgent cheesefests unleashed by her brother.

in the 90s she trod the safer, summery r&b route, to great effect, then lost her way slightly in the 00s by failing to live up to the standards she set for herself. however, in today's gossip and scandal obsessed culture, surfacing rumours of an 80s baby with then teenage husband james debarge and that wardrobe malfunction have ensured her profile remains high regardless.

and you know you want to look that good when you hit 40. so here is some lesser known janet, enjoy!

top 10 lesser known janet tracks - download here

making love in the rain
the first collaboration with jazz artist herb alpert released in 1987 , this is a sultry chillout track in a similar vein to 'funny how time flies'.

diamonds
the second, and better known herb alpert track, following a similar path to the upbeat 'control' numbers.

he doesn't know i'm alive
quintessentially 80s and often overlooked 'control' track. ok yes, i used to sing this into a hairbrush.

one more chance
1993 b side to 'if' from the 'janet' era. probably left off due to the proliferation of slow jams making the album.

pretty boy
cool electro funk from the 1984 'dream street' album. production-wise, a preview to things to come.

don't mess up this good thing
janet was too young, and jumped on too late to be a disco pioneer. but this standout track from her self titled debut in 1982 was a taste of what might have been.

where are you now
mid-tempo remix of a melancholy 'janet' track, made sunnier for the 'janet:remixed' album by nellee hooper.

70s love groove
'janet:remixed' track originally on the 'you want this' single. similar to 'any time, any place'.

you need me
included on the re-released cassette version of 'rhythm nation 1814'. a 'miss you much' clone (never a bad thing).

accept me
mid-tempo grower released as a b side to 'every time' from 'the velvet rope'.