#SALT N PEPA BLACKS MAGIC SONGS MOVIE#
#SALT N PEPA BLACKS MAGIC SONGS SERIES#

Too young to truly comprehend a song about snaky male libido, I settled on hypnosis, fixated on their unison timbres and the unflinching chorus, a single word: TRRRAMP.īy Blacks' Magic, though, I was old enough to get it, and so it blew open my brain in a different way. I wanted to hear what these women were saying, to understand the mystery of what the lyrics meant.

#SALT N PEPA BLACKS MAGIC SONGS MOVIE#

It wasn't the first hip-hop track I ever heard - that might have been Kurtis Blow's 'Basketball' or something from the movie Breakin' - but it's the first memory I have of the rush of hearing an avant-garde sound from what I assumed was space, mesmerizing and disorienting as I tried to perform jetés and the Smurf across the floor.

(Because you are reading this, it seems fairly clear that I was not.) Contrary to my favorite album Control, though, 'Tramp' and its bassline, sampled from Otis Redding and Carla Thomas but whittled way down, blew my 10-year-old brain wide open. 'Push It' was always on the radio, an ambient memory of an era that imprinted itself on my brain, but my favorite early track of theirs was the A-side, 'Tramp.' I first heard it in a dance class circa 1987 at the Masonic Temple in Cheyenne, in a building with a dusty burnished wood staircase which seemed glamorous enough that I believed I was being set up for a future as a child back-up dancer for Janet Jackson. The patina of Blacks' Magic, and specifically the strength in which Salt-N-Pepa delivered their many messages on it, gave a lonely Mexican Wyoming girl a blueprint for a confidence I didn't inherently possess.Īs a kid, I simply adored Salt-N-Pepa, superstars to the hilt: their self-certain voices, their jaunty dance moves, their bright leather bomber jackets.

They were pop but they were hard, exemplifying the false equivalence between 'femininity' and 'softness,' and putting down classic MC bluster over beats meant for the dancefloor. But I know I was dancing to match the mic attack of Cheryl 'Salt' James and Sandra 'Pepa' Denton, who, along with their compatriot DJ Deidra 'Spinderella' Roper, had blasted their way into the American consciousness a few years prior with the indelible and ubiquitous 'Push It,' gold doorknocker earrings and shiny spandex catsuits in tow. There is no record of this, as I was a bedroom-confined tween imagining music videos on a stage of cream-colored carpet, my audience a doe-eyed Maltese Terrier my mom and I called Chip. I don't remember the specific choreography I invented for 'Expression,' the first single off Salt-N-Pepa's third and nearly perfect album Blacks' Magic, but given the era - '89, '90 - I am certain it was big, full-bodied and probably involved the Running Man. Because the way that certain music comes to hold a central place in our lives isn't just a reflection of how we develop our taste, but how we come to our perspective on the world.

#SALT N PEPA BLACKS MAGIC SONGS SERIES#

For 2021, we're digging into our own relationships to the records we love, asking: How do we know as listeners when a piece of music is important to us? How do we break free of institutional pressures on our taste while still taking the lessons of history into account? What does it mean to make a truly personal canon? The essays in this series will excavate our unique relationships with the albums we love, from unimpeachable classics by major stars to subcultural gamechangers and personal revelations. Up until now we have focused on overturning conventional, patriarchal best-of lists and histories of popular music. NPR Music's Turning the Tables is a project envisioned to challenge sexist and exclusionary conversations about musical greatness. (Photo Illustration by Renee Klahr/NPR Getty Images Courtesy of Next Plateau Records)

The strength with which Salt-N-Pepa delivered messages on Blacks' Magic 'gave a lonely Wyoming girl a blueprint for a confidence I didn't inherently possess,' writes Julianne Escobedo Shepherd.

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