from Critical Noir @ Vibe.com
"Just Be Good to Me": R&B's Forgotten Era (Part 1)
By Mark Anthony Neal
As a practice, R&B music--the more formal corporate product of the post-1970s era--has been given short shrift by the critical intelligentsia. The volume of writing on Soul, Jazz, Hip-Hop and the more traditional Rhythm & Blues has easily dwarfed any significant critical forays into contemporary R&B music, save the brilliant work done by scholars and critics such as Sasha Frere-Jones, Daphne Brooks and Jason King on the hybrid musical landscape that R&B's furtive relationship with hip-hop production has wrought. Even the smart work that Oliver Wang is doing on the retro pop-Soul artists like Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones and Nicole Willis is really a nod to the throwback days of the late 1950s and 1960s.
And if such a gap in critical assessment of R&B exist, nowhere is it more pronounced than in the music produced in the early to mid 1980s--a time when mainstream pop-top-40 radio (after its homophobic and racist retreat from Disco), in concert with MTV's then musical apartheid approach to programming pop music, effectively undermined the social experiment that was pop radio in 1970s. Ironically this was only a few years after many of the major labels had invested heavily in black acts with the hope of crossing those artists over to white mainstream audiences. Enter the recession of the late 1970s and early 1980s and what was left was a musical environment that was as segregated as it was when the "Hot Soul Singles" charts--soon called "Black Singles" charts--were still referred to as the "Race Music" charts.
In this context a generation of artists and producers emerged, with new technologies at their disposal, like the first generation of Roland TR-808 and Linn LM-1 programmable drum machines and very little pressure to make music for the mainstream (read: white folk). For producers like James Mtume, Reggie Lucas, The Calloway Brothers (Reggie and Vincent), and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, the period represented a chance to innovate, while reinvigorating the music in the aftermath of too much infusion of corporate cash. It was George Clinton who famously described the music as "rhythm and bullshit" in the late 1970s, as he called out for "One Nation Under a Groove." As many of these young producers cut their first rugs to Parliament Funkadelic they took heed: "Here's our chance to dance our way, out of our constrictions."
While mixed company in post-Civil Rights, multicultural America can all hum Motown, Atlantic-era Stax, Al Green, Aretha Franklin, and The Stylistics, check the silence when names like Midnight Starr ("Curious"; "Slow Jam"), Patrice Rushen ("Forget Me Nots"), The SOS Band ("Take Your Time"; "Weekend Girl"), Frankie Beverly and Maze ("We Are One"; "Before I Let Go"), Stephanie Mills ("Never Knew Love Like This"; "What Cha Gonna do with My Lovin'" ) Atlantic Starr (with Sharon Bryant on lead: "Silver Shadow"; "Send for Me"), The Deele ("Sweet November"; "Two Occasions"), Cheryl Lynn ("Encore"; "Got to Be Real"), Kashif ("Stone Love"; "Are You the Woman?"), Alexander O'Neal ("Fake"; "Criticize"), DeBarge ("Stay with Me"; "I Like It") and Loose Ends ("Slow Down") are rolled out.
There are of course exceptions. A cross-over figure like Chaka Khan managed to straddle the Funk world via her work with Rufus, while her solo career--"I'm Every Woman" era Chaka--pivots with the emergence of contemporary R&B. The same can be said for George Benson, who transitioned from elite jazz guitarist to a major purveyor of pop radio-friendly R&B, largely courtesy of his chart-topping ballad "This Masquerade" (1976) and his foot-tapping live remake of The Drifters' "On Broadway" (1977). As with so much so-called black music from the late 1970s and early 1980s, George Benson's success on both the Pop and R&B charts is often forgotten. Musically, Benson's sound was enhanced by his work with band-leader and producer Quincy Jones, who began the 1970s with string of funk-heavy jazz releases (of which Body Heat is most typical) and began to push for a more pop-ish sound (with a nod to Gamble and Huff, I'd say) with the release of Sounds...And Stuff Like That in 1978. Sounds... featured the vocals of goddaughter Patti Austin, Ashford and Simpson, Chaka Khan, Gwen Guthrie and a then unknown Luther Vandross.
For Jones, 1978 marked his first collaboration with Michael Jackson (on the soundtrack for The Wiz), which of course lead to their future accomplishments with Off the Wall (1979), Thriller (1982) and Bad (1987). Of the three albums Jones produced with Jackson, Off the Wall was likely the most influential in the R&B world (see Rod Temperton's song writing for the connection), as young R&B producers drew from the examples of Jones, Gamble and Huff, the aforementioned Clinton, Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers (Chic) and the adult Stevie Wonder to create sounds pitched for the post-Bakke, B-Movie era (with a nod to Gil Scott-Heron).
Read Part 2
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