One Hit No More, No. 110: Why The Vapors Floated Away

Probably what you remember.

What was the most “’80s’ sound” of the 1980s? If it was new wave...

The Hit
David Fenton remembers the inspiration for his famous song – i.e., sitting in a flat in Guildford, UK, thinking about holding the photograph that’s all you have left in a relationship – and he recalled having the melody, but struggling with the lyrics. One night, he woke with the phrase “turning Japanese” in his head. He wrote down the words and, over the following days, pushed the song as close to final as he could before passing it off to his bandmates for polishing.

As it turns out, the phrase “turning Japanese” didn’t mean anything in particular. As Fenton put it in a recent interview with Songwriting, “It could have been anything! It could have ended up as Turning Portuguese.”

The Vapors’ famously frenetic 1980 hit, “Turning Japanese,” never meant anything, as it turns out. According to some annotated lyrics, the song kicks around themes of obsessive behavior and separation...which doesn't offer an obvious connectoin to becoming “Japanese” apparent, so I kept thinking. As I listened to the song several times over the past week, I thought the connection might follow from old ‘80s stereotypes about Japanese tourists – i.e., the joke went they took pictures of everything, a trope you can see in movies from the early to mid-1980s – but no one mentioned that, so I’m moving off that one, and with relief.

The other rumor swirled around the song’s lyrics, particularly here in the States, held that alluded to masturbation. From that same interview:

“It was weird when people started saying it was about masturbation. I can’t claim that one! That happened when we went to America – for some reason they thought it was an English phrase for masturbation. I thought that was quite interesting, and it made people talk about the song and created more interest, so it didn’t hurt I don’t think, but that wasn’t the intention.”

Crash Course No. 40: Digable Planets, A Short-Lived, but Brilliant Solar System

Vibe of their videos...

Some Basics
“I was basically thinking the music we made was something people could dig, so Digable. I was listening to a lot of George Clinton and Sun Ra, so I was on some space shit, cosmic. I was thinking of each person as a planet, we are all in a solar system, a galaxy and trying to orbit around each other. That was my imagination for those words.”
- Ishmael “Butterfly” Butler

“Digable Planets performed with live musicians and showed audiences that there isn’t any box that hip-hip should fit in. There wasn’t ‘conscious hip-hop’ and ‘gangsta rap.’ The group proved through their music and their style that they could be hardcore b-boys and b-girls, intellectuals, and party people all at the same time.”
- Ericka Blount Danois, okayplayer (2018)

The members of Digable Planets found one another through two different meetings: Butler, who originally hailed from Seattle, met Craig “Doodlebug” Irving while interning at Philadelphia’s Sleeping Bag Records; Irving had met Mariana “Ladybug” Vieira at DC’s Howard University. They all had similar upbringings – all three had parents involved in the Black Liberation movement (Vieira’s from their/her(?) native Brazil) – and, not surprisingly, they all felt the pull of music, whether from obsessing over the radio dial (Ladybug) or raiding their parents’ record collections (Butterfly and Doodlebug). Ladybug found further inspiration from the breakthrough of some famous female rappers of the late 1980s (e.g., Roxanne Shante, MC Lyte, Queen Latifah, Salt & Pepa (and Spinderella, dammit!).

Officially formed in 1989, the first demos recorded as “Digable Planets” featured only Butler, but he and Irving vibed all right (“once we got cool”), so Butler made his pitch and worked his connections. From Irving:

“He asked me to join him in putting this new group together and after hearing the demos he put together I was hooked. Eventually Ladybug joined the group and Butter through the connects he made while being an intern at Sleeping Bag records, was able to parlay a meeting with Dennis Wheeler, an A&R at an up and coming label called Pendulum and the rest is history!”

History took a few years to start, but they put out work and garnered attention (there’s something about a “Rosie Perez co-sign on In Living Color” in the interview with Vieira, but she leaves it hanging) until Pendulum Records signed them in 1992 and Digable Planets relocated to Brooklyn. They had a good bond early. From Vieira:

Crash Course Timeline, No. 43: Kay Kyser, the Big Band Era's Funnest Bandleader

The Ol' Perfessor

For this last chapter of the Big Band leaders of the late 1930s-early 1940s, the topic turns to the happiest and, all things considered (Exhibit A and Exhibit B) the least sociopathic.

“This band was secure enough to be downright silly, something the Millers and Goodmans would never have done.”

I’m not sure why they dragged Glenn Miller into this. He seemed like one of the nice ones. Also, this:

“He was one of the most outrageous, over the top performers of the whole swing era. From the late 30s to the late 40s he was the physical embodiment of the word success, with eleven #1 records and thirty-five top tens! He starred in seven feature films with such co-stars as Lucille Ball, John Barrymore, Karloff, Lugosi, Lorre. Kyser kept his radio show, Kay Kyser's Kollege of Musical Knowledge in the top ten for eleven years on NBC, yet if you ask the average swing fan about him today, they'll likely reply, ‘Kay Kyser. Who's she?’”

James Kern Kyser, who later found fame as Kay Kyser, was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina to a solid middle-class, two-income family; his mother, Emily Royster (nee Howell) was the first female licensed pharmacist in the state of North Carolina. Unlike the titans of the swing era, Kyser had neither a favored instrument nor a deep passion for music. He did learn the clarinet and played well enough to record a couple sides early in his career, but the role of master entertainer was his true calling. And he would lean into that eventually.

Kyser met North Carolina’s most famous bandleader, Hal Kemp (profiled here) while still in college and Kemp would give him two major lifts to his career. Recognizing his charisma and indefatigable energy, Kemp handed the reins of the University of North Carolina’s band, the Carolina Club Orchestra, to Kyser when he departed to start his own professional band in 1927. Kyser walked in his mentor’s footsteps after graduation, forming a band of his own (ft. saxophonist Sully Mason and with George Duning handling the arranging) and, by touring night spots across the American Midwest, he built up his own following.

Kemp handed Kyser his second break – and this was the big one – when he recommended Kyser’s band to take over his spot at Chicago’s famous Blackhawk Restaurant in 1934. Having a stable job helped him land talent – he had Merwyn Bogue, aka, “Ish Kabibble” (a spin on “Ish Ga Bibble” which loosely translates to “I should worry”) since 1931, but he added future stars Ginny Simms and “Handsome” Harry Babbit during his time at the Blackhawk – and the band started to record Duning’s arrangements, the most famous being the song that would become his theme, “Thinking of You.” But it took a brainstorm Kyser, et, al. to make him a household name during the war years.