CRITICAL NOIR:
Love that (White) Girl: Post-Race Nostalgia in the Age of Obama and Palin
by Mark Anthony Neal
Raphael Saadiq has been managing the archive for much of his career, beginning more than 20-years with his work with Tony, Toni, Tone, songwriting collaborations with D'Angelo (of which "Untitled" is the clear standout, his stellar production on tracks like Mary J. Blige's "I Found My Everything" and the Earth, Wind & Fire comeback recording Illumination, as well as his own shade-short-of-brilliant-though-obscure solo recording career.
Saadiq is in fine company with the likes of Jimmy Scott, the late Ronnie Dyson and Rahsaan Patterson--men who share Saadiq's proclivity to finesse vocals in registers well beyond the privilege masculinity affords. Quite frankly, upon hearing "Love that Girl" the lead single from Saadiq latest album The Way I See It for the first time, I thought I was listening to woman. Yet it was a woman--some Joss Stone look-alike lovely--that arrested my attention as I gazed on the video treatment for "I Love That Girl."
Retro-fitted with a sound heisted from the Brunswick label's rhythm section--and imaging packaged with a giddy 1960s innocence reminiscent of The Wonder Years, "Love that Girl" is perfectly pitched for the so-called post-Race moment. The video for Raphael Saadiq's "Love That Girl" succeeds, in part, because it trafficks in the very anxieties of this moment, by inverting the cynicism that that informs much of the political discourse emanating from media pundits.
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