I don't know about you - seriously, why aren't you commenting more? - but I've missed taking a little time to write about the music I like (and also the music I don't: I really owe a Worst Song Ever. Evil never sleeps). So, just because this whole thing popped into my head as I was waking up this morning... a few left field favorites by some of my favorite African American srtists (and as I looked for links, I realized you could also call this "The Soul Train Variations").
Jody Watley, Looking for a New Love. If we're planning to bring back the eighties - and I'm fine with it, really - I've realized that my objection to much of "best of the eighties" nonsense is ignoring crucial gems like this one that don't quite fit into the mass produced picture of what the eighties were. Watley, a Soul Train dancer from way back, was recruited into Shalimar, a dance music act concocted from within the show's operation. Chafing under excessive control, she went off and started doing her own thing. Which included, by happenstance, being in London at the time "Do They Know It's Christmas?" was recorded, and winding up on the record. Shortly after that, her first album dropped, and it was both hard to place and somehow definitive. From the first moment of Looking for a New Love's eerie whistle, you were in a different place that somehow made perfect sense in the world of pop. And that's before Watley delivered one of the most precise, angry woman takedowns heard up to that moment. All that and "Hasta La Vista, Baby." And this morning, I reaized I just missed hearing it.
Shalamar, The Second Time Around. ...that led me back to remembering the joys of Jody's first group. Shalamar didn't sound like a lot of other pop/dance efforts - even if the high ptched, slightly tinny harmonies were a natural fit for radio (and led, for instance to stuff like DeBarge and The Jets), musically, they were neither as bass heavy as much of R&B was at the time, nor quite like the rest of contemporary pop. Which may explain why they were both occasionally wildly successful, yet never quite defined the late seventies period. And which may explain why this fizzy, cheerful gem has sort of fallen through history's cracks, even with it's hard to dispute argument that if at first you don't succeed, you'll find love on the second time around.
Donna Summer, Love is in Control (Finger on the Trigger). Like many a gay boy my age (I do say that a bit, don't I? Well it's my experience, anyway), the Disco moment of 1978-79 was an awakening. Two of the first record albums(!) I ever received were the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever and Gloria Gaynor's Hot Tracks (the orginal "I Will Survive" - we wore it out, gurl). And though I never owned any of Summer's essential albums (I remember thinking Bad Girls was expensive), she was my Queen, too. Donna fits in an odd place in music history because Disco garnered her a white audience that turned out to be more lasting than her black one - Summer's had far fewer runaway successes on the R&B charts, comparatively, and became lass and less of a fit with the rest of black radio. After disco was declared dead, conventional wisdominsisted Summer's career was wrecked... and kept insisting that as, through the eighties, she released a string of successful albums and spun out a number of hit singles. Working with Quincy Jones, she escaped disco (musically) by adapting to the newest musical settings (Jones was also transforming Michael Jackson at this same time), and "Love is in Control" is one of the best examples of how she managed to pull it off. Sexy, playful, and slightly dangerous ("I've got my finger on the trigger... love is in control..... You'd better raise your sights up high, or I will blow you right away."), Summer was as hip, urban and cosmopolitan as ever. Though her hits of the eighties, too, tend to fall through that crack of not quite fitting any retro format.
The SOS Band, Take Your Time (Do It Right). The SOS Band's later hits ("Just The Way You Like It", "Borrowed Love") fit comfortably, even now, into retro R&B, mostly because they represent the height of a collaboration the band had with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, long before they made their mark working with Janet Jackson. But that work was actually a mid-career shift; prior to their eighties renaissance, the SOS Band was a near Chic-like disco operation, all throbbing bass and synth tones. "Take Your Time" remains a left field smash - I've never seen it fail at a dance party, a trick up a smart DJ's sleeve, among those "Oh my god, remember this one" moments people love to rediscover. Bouncy, also sexy... the fast moving song about doing it (yes... it) slow, Take your time is one of the perfect, just vague enough dirty metaphors that pop thrives on. Plus, I think Mary Davis, their lead singer, may be one of the most underappreciated lead voices ever.
Pebbles, Mercedes Boy. For me, this song was the summer of 1988, in many ways a zenith moment for pop radio, the crest of the New Wave that had started around 1982, the perfect time for a boy like me, who could love this and Def Leppar's Pour Some Sugar on Me and hear them pretty much back to back on the radio. Unlike many fantasies of wealth and success, Mercedes Boy puts you in the position of having the toys already - "Do you want to ride in my Mercedes, boy? ...There are so many things that I'm gonna do to you" - and using them to get, well, sex. Pop retro radio doesn't play Pebbles much anymore, even though she enjoyed a string of hits which Mercedes Boy was about in the middle of. Not reviving her hits, too, seems like a shame.
Recent Comments