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aatventure
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dj-vinyl
44 years ago
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#Electronic | TechnoTrance
A Number of Names | Shari Vari (1981)
“Sharevari” is a song by the group A Number Of Names and, although it was only pressed with a few hundred copies in its original print run, it has become a foundational club record and holds an oversized influence in the transition between Italo Disco and Detroit Techno.
A Number Of Names is Sterling Jones and Paul Lesley, two Black men from Detroit who worked with a third artist called Roderick Simpson to make “Sharevari” (the song has since appeared as “Share Vari” - the label of the original single has no spacing and A Number Of Names appears as ANUMBEROFNAMES).
The group would press the single to a vanity label called Capriccio Records in 1981. A Number Of Names only recorded one other song, “Skitso” in 1982, for a Canadian label. The A-side of “Sharevari”, the vocal version, is an Italo Disco styled synth-pop fantasia with a first person narrator in a bad pan-European accent talking about his glamorous night life.
To understand why a bunch of guys in Detroit would make a song like this, one has to understand the Detroit of the early 1980s. At the time, Detroit was still a major hub for car manufacturing and with good union jobs available to workers, they and their families were able to live affluent lives. During this period, a radio DJ called the Electrifying Mojo on Detroit’s WGPR 107.5 played sets that combined funk, new wave, and European imports. Mojo carved out a niche for cool, alternative sounds and its this sound that the children of monied auto workers wanted to hear at house parties and school discos. It’s no coincidence that the closing synth riff from Kraftwerk’s 1981 song “It’s More Fun To Compute” shows up throughout “Sharevari”.
“Sharevari” is typically referred to as proto-techno, but in many ways it really isn’t. The song is fastened to a 4/4 beat like Italo Disco and like what would become House in Chicago, but not necessarily like Detroit Techno. The burbling synth sounds more like “Funkytown” by Lipps Inc. than anything that would come out of the first wave of Detroit Techno. The vocals are very comedic, I sense that the whole thing is meant to be very tongue in cheek, whereas Detroit Techno is known to be deadly serious. One thing that I find interesting in “Sharevari” that does thematically link it to Detroit Techno is the allusion of driving and forward momentum. The lyrics to “Sharevari” mention the narrator is driving a Porsche (and the catalog number of the single, P-928, is a reference to the Porsche-928) and cars and driving are frequently mentioned in Detroit Techno (Cybotron’s “Cosmic Cars” (1982), Model 500’s “Night Drive (Thru Babylon)” (1985), Carl Craig’s Landcruising (1995), etc.). Detroit is the Motor City after all.
What is fascinating to me is that this song was, at best, a regional hit but its influence spread throughout the world from the songs that came in its wake. Juan Atkins and Richard Davis formed Cybotron in Detroit the same year that “Sharevari” was released and their mix of new wave, funk, and NYC electro would really start to outline what would become the Detroit Techno sound.
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