In the decades after desegregation and the most publicly visible work of the Civil Rights movement, a black middle class took shape. Melvin Lindsey's silky, youthful voice and his smooth soul-song selections coupled with the Sunday-evening slot to create something bigger than he could have imagined: The Quiet Storm. "Backatcha" was a #7 disco single- flutes and light Latin percussion buoyed the backbeat- but it was a Robinson disco single between two songs devoted to the pleasures of getting funky, Smokey turned up the gain on a couple's dancefloor conversation. The one week that Quiet Storm's "Baby That's Backatcha" spent atop the R&B singles chart was preceded for two weeks by R&B veteran Joe Simon's cheesy disco pander "Get Down Get Down (Get on the Floor)" and followed by Kool & the Gang's spaced-out "Jungle Boogie" copy "Spirit of the Boogie". A 4/4 thump at 120 beats per minute became the dancefloor metronome, and lyrics about dancing, dancers, and the culture of the dancefloor were back with a vengeance. And in the mid-70s it was disco that was quickly infiltrating pop radio and the charts. Barry White.īut in pop music, novelty is always more visible than continuity.
Marvin Gaye was in between Let's Get It On and I Want You. Jones" was three years old in '75, and that song's producers, Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, were coming off their remarkable peak of bringing lush strings and skittering hi-hats to R&B, more or less setting the template for disco. Al Green and Minnie Riperton took minimalist bedroom soul mainstream, largely owing to their ownership of their respective upper vocal registers. Roberta Flack- her voice dubbed "the sound of melting velvet"- was a star, and her duets with classically-trained Donny Hathaway added a moody influence drawn from his jazz training. The album re-energized Robinson's flagging career, helped by the fact that it fit well with a lot of black chart music at the time, which was doubling down on the initial break between the spiritual and the carnal that birthed soul music. A Quiet Storm plays like a concept album devoted to tranquil monogamy. "I saw seven songs carried on the back of a breeze, blowing through the record from start to finish." The nearly eight-minute title track establishes the Quiet Storm not as a meteorological phenomenon providing ambience, but as an intangible stimulant flowing through Robinson's body: "A power source of tender force." In his review, writer Robert Christgau keyed in on the album's most important contribution: ".rhythmically it seems to respond more to his internal state than to any merely physical criterion." Indeed, this is soul music aiming not for the hips, but a deeper metaphysical connection between two intimate lovers. "I finally had the musical concept I'd been seeking since hearing What's Going On," Robinson later said. The album opens like radio theater: an impossibly high-pitched synth-produced whistle- our soft warning siren- is paired with wind sound effects, which gradually give way to a loping bassline that could have been drawn from countless 60s Motown hits.
"With 18 years of singing, writing, and producing behind him, he naturally passes over both self-celebration and prophecy in favor of love and happiness." "Robinson is moved neither by Marvin Gaye's macho sensibilities nor by Stevie Wonder's semi-mystical mental images, and he has more pop expertise than either," wrote Robert Palmer in Rolling Stone. Seamlessly updating the style of contemplative romantic soul music he'd invented with "You've Really Got a Hold On Me", "Ooo Baby Baby", "The Tracks of My Tears", and "More Love", Storm reasserted Robinson as a soul auteur. Robinson set out to make his own What's Going On, but whereas Gaye turned his focus so empathetically outward, Robinson looked inward. Even coming out of the tumultuous late 60s, politics never figured in Smokey's music. Here was an album rightfully celebrated for its political message that also managed to sound effortlessly smooth. Gaye's 1971 suite What's Going On in particular vexed Robinson. Meanwhile, Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye zoomed past him to become the label's- and to a degree, African-American popular music's- torchbearers. After setting the standard for Motown during the 1960s and being named vice president of the label, he'd split with the Miracles, and his first two post-Miracles solo albums (1973's Smokey and 1974's Pure Smokey) hadn't performed to his expectations. Listen to a 104-track (!) Quiet Storm playlist compiled by writer Eric Harvey on Spotify.īy 1974, Smokey Robinson was adrift. Underscore surveys undervalued artists, scenes, and eras of the musical past.
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