Everybody needs Green Velvet

Everybody needs Green Velvet

17 November, 2009 | 8.32AM

• Written by: Terry Church
• Filed under: Music News: cajmere, green velvet, relief records

“A Christian can certainly be a dance music fan. Just as long, as with anything, they do not give into the evils that may surround it,” so begins our chat with Chicago’s Curtis Jones aka Green Velvet.

The long-serving house and techno DJ has been around the block enough times, to know what ‘evils’ lurk near dance music, and on his new single ‘Everybody Wants’ the producer is back on his bible-clad soap box, this time teaming up with fellow Chicagoan Kid Sister to warn about the perils of one night stands.

“‘Everybody Wants’ is about how people want somebody who everybody wants,” says Jones. “In the track Kid Sister is approached by a guy in the club who wants a one night stand but she doesn’t go for it. This makes her even more wanted.”

Abstinence makes you more desirable then, or something like that. Anyway, regardless of the moral, Green Velvet proves himself yet again to be a cunning linguist (oh, grow up), a rare breed of a dance producer, capable of telling meaningful, albeit curiously contradictory stories for dancefloors full of sinners.

“I would like to think that I am always helping somebody through the music I make,” he says. “I try to make music so that people will dance their cares away. It doesn’t matter age, background, or circumstances, we all have challenges and stresses.

“I strive to make music that takes one’s mind off the stresses and pressures of everyday life and puts that individual in a positive place of joy.”

Praise be to the message, which too often in dance tracks are self-fulfilling odes to the act itself. Is anyone bored yet of ‘raise your hands in the air’, ‘reach for the sky’, or ‘the feeling of elevation and harmony one feels through the transitive nature of alignment to uniformed rhythms’? Ok, I made that last one up.

Yet, Green Velvet parries the reputed hedonism and decadence of dance music by layering it over, well, infectious electro grooves.

“I’m really into simple, heavy bass grooves with weird synth sounds these days, and tracks that are positive in nature,” he says.

Is his music a Trojan horse for Christian conjecture? If he was an outsider, then yes, it would seem like a particularly farcical case of ‘kid’s speak’ - long may we be past the age of corporations, political parties, and agenda-driven groups rapping about their ‘thing’ in order to be hip with the kids - but Jones is a man who once lived vicariously in the laser-cloaked rave scene, warts ‘n all, before realising the “error” of his ways.

(Contrary to the ubiquitous love shown by pill munchers worldwide for Green Velvet’s biggest hit ‘La La Land’, Jones actually wrote the track in 2001 to persuade one of his friends to give up drugs).

Regardless of his message, proxy or not, the fact that Green Velvet continues to inject meaning into dance music makes him a much welcomed preacher.

“I was raised knowing God as a child, he says. “I was a lost sheep for a while but I have found my way back. My early productions were done with God in mind for the most part - ‘Preacher Man’, ‘Brighter Days’, ‘U Got Me Up’, and ‘Day By Day’.

“Nowadays, I focus on doing what I can to bring love and joy into however I’m entertaining.”

Regardless of his message, proxy or not, the fact that Green Velvet continues to inject meaning into dance music makes him a much welcomed preacher.

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