11/8/2022 0 Comments Alicia keys diary album producers![]() ![]() Alicia Keys is a seventies-soul classicist, with a particular passion for Isaac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield, and Donny Hathaway. They have been less than inspiring on most of their recent projects, running through the same patina of seventies falsetto soul on their own “Frontin’,” Jay-Z’s “Excuse Me Miss,” and Snoop Dogg’s “Beautiful.” But here, Williams (mostly) backs off the microphone and, better, reinvigorates the Neptunes’ sound by fashioning a kind of electropop that will likely be the envy of electroclash producers everywhere.Ĭlassicists are as legion in pop as gangsta rappers and American Idol–style singers: There are New Wave classicists, New York rock classicists, even classicists dedicated to dance-music subgenres like acid house. Indeed, the true stars of Tasty are producers Chad Hugo and Pharrell Williams (a.k.a. don’t sell satisfaction!”-set to drum-machine beats and twinkling synth effects so stark they could be minimal techno. “Millionaire,” a duet with OutKast’s André 3000, has the pair trading clever lines about nonmaterialistic romance-“Saks Fifth Ave. While Tasty features predictable envy-inspiring flaunts of sex and cash, the album is good-hearted, too. “My milkshake brings all the boys in the yard,” she taunts, singsonglike, on Tasty’s astounding first single, “Milkshake.” Instead, she masks her come-ons with hilariously indecipherable metaphors. But excluding an off-puttingly pornographic duet with fiancé Nas, Kelis smartly avoids being explicit (she knows that everyone from Lil’ Kim to Trina has made filthy forgettable). Kelis’s sophomore disc has the endearingly tacky sexiness of seventies adult films or early eighties Prince, down to the album’s title ( Tasty) and a dewily lensed pullout poster of the singer. It’s a state of affairs that makes the playful sexiness of R&B singer Kelis seem radical. Sex-whether it’s Britney Spears’s regressive good-girl/bad-girl routine or Christina Aguilera’s laughable attempts at making sluttiness “empowering”-has never been less interesting in pop. It presents them as winking ironists, not the true black-music believers that they were. Once in a Lifetime shies away from the Talking Heads’ life force. The result was one of the best, most profound bands in rock history, up there with the J.B.’s of the early seventies or the P-Funk of 1976’s “Mothership Connection” tour. The band recruited African-American players that only the most ardent admirers would recognize, Bernie Worrell, the keyboard genius of Parliament-Funkadelic, and Ednah Holt, the singer behind the monumental disco of West End Records, among them. You can hear the band’s love for the groove in the rock-voodoo of “I Zimbra” (which is still played at discos like Shelter), the bighearted cover of Al Green’s “Take Me to the River,” or the sample-perfect synth pulses of “Girlfriend Is Better.” Stop Making Sense (sadly not represented on Once in a Lifetime) was the fullest expression of the Talking Heads’ passion for black music. In a short essay, Byrne himself pins down what eludes the windy writers: The Talking Heads were soul and disco missionaries who wanted the world to know that “it was actually just as radical, at least structurally and musically, as the more critically hyped avant rock stuff that we loved.” And the liner notes are handed over to highbrow types like Rick Moody who bungle the job with feverish prose about downtown pretensions. The CDs and essay booklet are covered with Impressionist-style artwork and packaged in such an absurdly long box that it poked out of my bag like a fishing pole. Instead, they chose a safe embrace of artiness. ![]() The producers of Once in a Lifetime, a new Talking Heads box set, should have advanced this argument. They are, of course, white, almost geekily so, which makes their love of black music-and their supreme mastery of it-all the more remarkable. They matter because they are great black musicians. ![]() It’s an association that’s understandable given their design-school pedigree, the opaque postmodernism of Stop Making Sense, and David Byrne’s championing of folk artists like Howard Finster, but it doesn’t strike at the heart of what makes the Talking Heads matter. No band in rock history has ever been so associated with artiness as the Talking Heads. Soulful: A new box set misses the essence of the Talking Heads. ![]()
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