As was common for artists bringing new Black music from block parties to the charts, Newcleus struggled to maintain creative control as industry actors reckoned with their work. The mixing on Jam on Revenge, which stands out for a calibrated ’80s pop sensibility, was handled by WBLS disco DJ Jonathan Fearing, who made unsupervised structural changes to the final songs and forbade Newcleus’ members from entering the mixing room as he worked. Fearing, who passed away in 1985, “knew nothing about the streets; he knew what worked in clubs,” said Cozmo. (Fearing’s familiar re-works of the songs stick around on this reissue, and the Comic Sans liner notes credit “a jonathan fearing mix” in conspicuous quotation marks.) Newcleus never received royalties from the album’s original release on Sunnyview Records, which was co-owned by Morris Levy, the infamous record magnate charged with racketeering in 1986.
Despite some incredible songs on later albums, Newcleus’ commercial fortunes declined throughout the ’80s as hip-hop rapidly evolved. Ben Cenac found a second career making house music with the lovely Dream 2 Science project, featuring his wife Yvette on lead vocals. Cenac continues to run Jam-On Productions and maintains a trove of rare Newcleus recordings on their website; Chilly B, his longtime production partner, passed away in 2010 after a stroke. “Disco Kryptonite,” a loose “Jam on It” remix that’s new to this reissue, sticks out for atypical sound selection (whistles, hand drums) that’s less faithful to electro. It doesn’t feel superfluous, though, because it calls back to the old-school disco records that made the first Newcleus parties possible almost 50 years ago, closing the loop on their explorations. This album transports us to a vital time before the exhaustively-documented and sampled music known as ‘electro’ was codified as such.
More than mere proof-of-concept, Jam on Revenge shows how much of popular music’s power comes from artists’ efforts to negotiate between a personal vision and the larger forces—in scenes, in boardrooms, in the morass of daily life—that prod and pull at them. “I’m Not a Robot”, adapted from an early Positive Messengers demo, features a recognizable story in the tradition of ground-level R&B, about a man in the city struggling with addiction. “What he’s searching for is how to be free/What he finds is that he’s lost hold of reality,” sings Cozmo. The powers that be “think they’ve got our lives pre-programmed,” and they make it seem impossible to assert yourself. But he does it anyway: “They can’t stop me from living!” The message is clear: Even the most alienating circumstances leave room for the spark of creative potential. Just find the right buttons to push.
