Plenty has been written about Haight-Ashbury and the South Bronx of the '70s, and thanks to about a dozen photo books, punk fans too young to have pissed in the CBGB bathroom know what the graffiti looked like. Still, when it comes to dead music scenes, living witnesses tend to make a good point: You had to be there.
With Latin freestyle, or simply freestyle—that tangy mélange of electro-funk, hip-hop, bubblegum, and Latin sounds that was born in New York City in the mid-'80s and later enjoyed a period of mainstream popularity—it’s a slightly different story. With freestyle, which nominally turns 30 years old this August, the trick might have been almost being there.
This is no knock against the actual scene. By all accounts, it was a blast seeing pioneering groups like TKA and the Cover Girls play the Devil’s Nest, the Bronx nightspot that hosted influential DJ "Little" Louie Vega and is credited with starting the movement. Freestyle was club music—the sound of young Latinos lifting off from Afrika Bambaataa’s "Planet Rock" with futuristic grooves all their own—and before it went Top 40, making stars of Shannon and Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam and informing the music of everyone from Pet Shop Boys to Debbie Gibson, it worked on street level, both with DJs and live acts.
That’s an essential part of the story, but freestyle functions in ways that disco, house, and other forms of more venue-dependent dance music don’t. At its best—Cynthia’s 1989 single "Thief of Hearts", for example—freestyle is haunting, bittersweet, and a little awkward. It’s all about contrasts: lively, syncopated electro beats and neon synths set against eerie-minor key melodies and the most melodramatic lyrics heard outside of goth circles. It’s escapist and gloomy at the same time, and when the singers can’t sing (Johnny O’s "Fantasy Girl"), that somehow makes it even better.
If freestyle was built for New York City (and later Miami) clubgoers, it made a lasting impact on legions of uncool suburban kids lucky enough to come of age and discover love in the time of Lisa Lisa. Roughly as subtle as the purple turtleneck Stevie B wears in the video for his anxious 1988 hit "Dreamin’ of Love", freestyle thrives on big, bold feelings. It celebrates love that burns up every cell in your body (Lisette Melendez’s canonical "Together Forever") and bemoans heartbreak that leaves your soul frozen solid (Tina B’s "January February"). Trilogy’s obscure gem "Red Hot" does both.
There is no emotional climate control; that’s what makes it not only timeless teenage music, but essential summertime listening.
As mythologized in decades of deceptively lightweight pop songs going back at least as far as Chubby Checker’s "Let’s Twist Again"—arguably a crypto-bummer about trying to recapture a moment that’s gone—summertime is about romance, not reality: the promise and peril of new love, the delicious ache that comes with having your heart squeezed dry like a Fla-Vor-Ice tube.
As chilly as they can be, freestyle classics like Shannon’s "Give Me Tonight", Lil Suzy’s "Take Me In Your Arms", and Noel’s "Silent Morning" burn with a passion uniquely suited for long, hot nights—especially the type that play out in your head when you’re a dopey pre-teen in, say, July 1987 hearing Expose’s Top 10 crossover smash "Point of No Return" on the radio and wondering what it feels like to experience love on that magnitude.
Given freestyle’s summery vibe, it’s probably no accident that DJ and producer Morgan Geist chose last month to release "Calling Card / Mezzanine", the debut single by his neo-freestyle project the Galleria. Geist’s relationship with the genre goes back to the '80s, when he was growing up in New Jersey. Tunes like Alisa’s "All Night Passion" and Nice N’ Wild’s "Diamond Girl" soundtracked his teenage infatuations, and as with many young people who experienced the music from outside the city’s club scene, he came to love freestyle somewhat begrudgingly, almost by osmosis.
"I associate this music with New Jersey and this kind of fuzzy, weird, both repellent and attractive feeling that I have towards growing up in New Jersey and going to these malls and feeling kind of isolated—like I was definitely missing out on what was going on in New York," Geist said in a recent interview with Rich Juzwiak.
Geist named the Galleria in homage to those shopping meccas of his youth. He was intrigued by the Dead Malls phenomenon before it had a name, but describing the impetus for the Galleria, he says he more wanted to conjure the confused adolescent emotions he felt back in the day, when he’d frequent those temples of commerce that are now boarded up. What better sound than utterly guileless, irony-free freestyle?
"Just being this pubescent kid, girls were magic," Geist said, expounding on why "Mezzanine", sung by Jessy Lanza, references the "creepily marketed" '80s-era perfume Love’s Baby Soft. "What’s tacky and horrible now was so dreamy when you were a teenager. You’d get a whiff of someone wearing Design, or some mall perfume, and my knees would get weak, because it’d be some girl I had a crush on. It was all of those feelings."
Geist isn’t the first to wax nostalgic about freestyle. Jesse Kivel and Zinzi Edmundson drew from the music for Kids in L.A., the 2013 sophomore album by their band Kisses. On the critical side, Maura Johnston writes in 2012 essay "The Season Came to an End: Freestyle Brings Loneliness To a Crowded Dance Floor", that freestyle "may be the loneliest genre" under a dance-floor umbrella ostensibly meant for communal experiences.
While some musicians and writers look to reevaluate and perhaps rehabilitate freestyle—which fell out of fashion in the mid-'90s—other fans see no need. Since about 2006, when Madison Square Garden hosted the sold-out "Freestyle Explosion," there’s been a strong demand for nostalgia concerts and package tours, and this summer offers no shortage of opportunities to see artists like Stevie B, TKA, Judy Torres, and Shannon sing their signature hits.
Another artist who occasionally works the nostalgia circuit is Maria Nocera, aka Nocera, the Sicilian singer behind "Summertime, Summertime", a No. 2 hit on the Billboard Hot Dance/Club Play chart in 1986. Perhaps the closest thing freestyle has to an out-and-out summer anthem (Stevie B’s "Spring Love" is far superior but off by a season), "Summertime, Summertime" is everything that’s wonderful and bizarre about freestyle baked into five otherworldly minutes.
"Take me to the water," Nocera sings in the chorus, sounding both cutesy and shrill—a woman of indeterminate age and nationality. "Maybe we can fall in love."
Presumably, she’s picturing herself on some beach with her sweetie, enjoying a reprieve from the rain outside her window, but there’s a mysterious quality that clouds the image. In the late '80s, whether you heard "Summertime, Summertime" in a Bronx club or booming out of a car in the parking lot at JCPenney, you were free to insert your own fantasy, get lost in your own emotions, imagine your own rendezvous.
It was a daydream you’d never realize, but sometimes, almost is even better.