Audio By Carbonatix
In Miami, freestyle still reigns supreme. The Latin rhythms and synth
stabs, combined with earnest, passionate lyrics, strike the heart of
nearly everyone in town old enough to have his or her heart broken in
the late 1980s. Anytime South Floridians hear “When I Hear Music” by
Debbie Deb or “Diamond Girl” by Nice & Wild, we drop our drinks,
grab whoever, dance, smile, and fall in love.
The best freestyle lyrics express exactly what a girl needs to hear
and exactly what a guy has to say. Think of the last text message you
sent to or received from a lover during a spat: “Baby, I didn’t mean to
make you cry” or “I had you all wrong” or “Please, let me make this
right.” If the shorthand of love is the text message, then its true
creators are performing May 30 at the Miami Freestyle Invasion Concert
at the BankUnited Center.
With its particularly Latin-dance bent, the genre was most popular
in the expected markets — besides Miami, in New York/New Jersey
and California, and even, randomly, Guam. And beyond these places, it
continues to pop up in unlikely locales. “It’s funny; I’ve gone to some
pretty rural places in the country. You wouldn’t think they know
freestyle, but they do,” Debbie Deb said by phone as she geared up for
Las Vegas’ recent Freestyle Invasion concert. “Louisiana — they
love freestyle!”
Debbie’s own freestyle career began in 1986, when she was working at
a Peaches music store on 163rd street in North Miami Beach. There she
met producer Pretty Tony, and one day he gave her a cassette with the
instrumental version of what would become her song “When I Hear Music.”
She went home and wrote all the lyrics to the iconic song. Sadly the
song and movement she helped ignite were soon taken from her. “I only
did a couple of shows. I really didn’t have the exposure when the songs
were really popular. Nobody knew what I looked like, so they had
another girl performing as Debbie Deb.” After settling out of court in
the mid-1990s, the original Debbie Deb has been back, performing her
own songs.
At the time, though, she didn’t know she was part of a forming
movement — the term freestyle was one the industry
attached to the genre. The artists themselves thought they were making
dance-pop music, perhaps a Latin hybridization of hip-hop. “As a joke,
people in the industry would call it cowbell music,” said Judy Torres,
singer of the 1986 club hit “No Reason to Cry.”
“Freestyle is a free style, an expression of the heart,” says singer
Johnny O, another leader of the genre who still speaks in catchy
rhythms without even trying. He sums up his own trajectory in the third
person: “Johnny O took a chance. Sometimes he hit a home run, sometimes
he struck out, but that’s OK. Johnny keeps swinging!”
Though it’s been a couple of decades since freestyle first exploded,
we still love the songs, and the artists still love singing them.
Freestyle, welcome home; you never ever left my heart.
At BrowardPalmBeach.com: Read full interviews with Debbie Deb,
Sa-fire, Johnny O, Judy Torres, and David of Nice & Wild.
