The new ad campaign for the roll-out of BlackBerry’s PlayBook tablet is based around a long-forgotten song – a flop upon its release – by a vocal group who, while regarded as legendary today, was generally (and sort of accurately) considered a bunch of has-beens when they recorded it all of 31 years ago. First of all: Thank You, BlackBerry! Your taste in music is awesome. Secondly: Good luck with that.
When we think of The Temptations, there are two different incarnations that come to mind. There’s the early-mid-60s Smokey Robinson-produced Temptations, who, after toiling away fairly fruitlessly in Motown’s gold (record) mines for nearly three years, finally hit the motherlode with ebullient pop ditties like “The Way You Do The Things You Do” and the lovely, beaming “My Girl”.
Then there’s the darker, funkier Norman Whitfield Temptations of the late 60s and early 70s, defined by its flights of social commentary set to increasingly elaborate and psychedelic orchestrations. These were songs that sounded spacey and felt spacious, draped in echoes and strings and deep, almost subliminal basslines, culminating in the twin peaks of “Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)”, a lushly harmonized, string-bedded, ballad of wishful thinking so beautifully and precisely realized it’s almost physically painful (in the best possible way) to hear, and the 1973 epic “Papa Was a Rolling Stone”, a song The Temptations didn’t even get the first stab at (Whitfield had recorded it with The Undisputed Truth a year earlier), but which remains one of the group’s most iconic hits.
But The Temptations discography gets a little fuzzy after that. In fact, though The Temptations, amidst myriad personnel changes, continued recording on a fairly regular basis well into the 90s (they still pop out an album every now and then), they’ve never come close to their earlier successes, and virtually everything they’ve recorded since, say, 1975, has gone largely forgotten, even by many Temptations anthologies. Which makes hearing their 1980 single “Power” on a new commercial for BlackBerry’s PlayBook tablet such a great surprise.
Anchored by the late great Melvin Franklin’s distinctive “po-ower, poom, poom” vocal bassline, “Power” is a fire-and-brimstone gospel sermon delivered over a just-past-disco groove by Dennis Edwards in full-on revival preacher mode: “All you poor!” Edwards declaims, “All you needy! All you’re doin’ is givin’ to the greedy!” The song clearly spoke to its own end-of-the-Carter-era moment although its prescription for salvation pointedly disincludes anything about, say, electing Republican candidates to national office. It’s more about giving glory to God than giving glory to people who pay God lip service. 30-plus years later, it feels utterly true to the weird conflation of religious zeal and the mightily propagandized fiscal policy panic of 2011. Go, BlackBerry!
The song was to have been the group’s great comeback single: Like The Spinners before them, The Temptations left Motown in the mid-70s to record for Ahmet Ertegun’s Atlantic label. They were one of the last of the classic Motown acts to either disband or defect from Motown. But unlike the Spinners who found their greatest success on Atlantic with an enviable string of hits between 1972 to 1980, The Temptations’ Atlantic tenure was brief and depressingly hitless. PlayBook! Yes!
It was Berry Gordy himself who’d wooed the The Temptations back to the fold with “Power”, a song he’d co-written, which he’d claimed to have been sitting on because he didn’t have anyone like The Temptations to record it. Gordy produced the track with a hearty nod to the group’s Norman Whitfield heyday, and it became the title track of the group’s 1980 homecoming album.
But even though “Power” became the group’s biggest hit in 5 years (and, sadly, it remains the group’s best charting single since their return to Motown), it stalled just outside of Billboard’s Top 40. The hedonistic days of disco weren’t yet a distant memory, and the song’s fate seems to speak more to pop radio’s BeeGees hangover than the song’s quality: people just weren’t ready to hear something this sincerely angry just yet – not on Top 40 radio at least. Which makes the song’s Age of AutoTune resurrection in the form of a national ad campaign for a semi-snazzy (although somewhat late-to-the-party, it seems) new tech gadget one of the sweeter, most out-of-nowhere musical surprises of this year. Hear the song in all its righteous fury here:
Before I head into my Top 10 songs of the year, here’s a recap of the previous 90. Click the links to see the blocks of videos and commentary for each group of ten:
#10#10: “WAIT TILL YOU SEE MY SMILE” by ALICIA KEYS.
It’s not often that a record as heavy on ballads as Alcia Keys’s fourth album is turns out to also be a fabulously exciting listen. But The Element of Freedom is, and this song, though regrettably not promoted as a single, is, to me, the album’s beating heart. It’s soft and understated in a way that Keys has never really been before, and that understatement is perfectly matched to the song’s theme of finding inner strength to face external opposition. It’s got a gorgeous build; and it feels like the deep breath you might take before jumping out of an airplane.
#9#9: “HAPPINESS” by ALEXIS JORDAN (with DEADMAU5).
18-year-old Alexis Jordan seemed poised to become a footnote to a pop-cultural footnote when she was eliminated from America’s Got Talent four years ago. And in another time, she probably would have. But now there’s YouTube. And Alexis Jordan has been nothing if not a prolific poster of videos of herself singing the day’s hit parade on the YouTube. Eventually, someone had to notice. But her debut single is way better than anyone might have expected based on the story of her career so far. Here, she takes an existing techno-rave song – “Brazil (2nd Edit)” by Canadian dj deadmau5 – and sings a sweet teenybopper song all over the top of it. A musical marriage made in the aisles of Old Navy.
#8#8: “ONE IN A MILLION” by NE-YO. Libra Scale, the fourth album by R&B singer-songwriter-producer Ne-Yo sounds like everything a new Michael Jackson album should and would sound like in the best of all parallel universes. And it also sounds like the album Ne-Yo has dreamed of making since he first decided to be a performer. It’s sweet, stylish, sexy; and it has a great sense of humor too. It’s also got a narrative storyline about three guys who are given superpowers with the caveat that by accepting them, they can never fall in love. Michael would have been proud. The narrative structure isn’t new for Ne-Yo though. The first time I ever heard of him, he was opening for John Legend (when John Legend was touring Get Lifted), and his set was an adorable one-man play about trying-and-failing-and-trying-again to get the girl. Libra Scale is that little stage act’s apotheosis.
#7#7: “ON TO THE NEXT ONE” by JAY-Z + SWIZZ BEATZ.
In which Jay-Z not-so-politely refuses to participate in any kind of – what do you call it? – oh yeah: recession. Jay-Z is and promises to remain a hip hop stimulus package unto himself. Yes, it’s true that he also released, simultaneously with this song, a single called “Young Forever” which was essentially a remake of a beloved 80s synthpop song by the German group Alphaville, and yes, you’d think that I would have fallen hard for that, and yes, I admit the sheet amount of nasty language in this song makes me cringe some, but I find every other thing about it highly addictive. And the video: who knew Jay-Z was a closet Goth (with an enthusiasm for basketball and Damien Hirst?)
#6#6: “SOLDIER OF LOVE” by SADE.
A new album by Sade? Enough said, really.
#5#5: “WAITING FOR THE END” by LINKIN PARK.
“I know what it takes to move on. I know how it feels to lie. All I want to do is trade this life for something new, holding on to what I haven’t got.” I never expected to fall as deeply in love with a Linkin Park album as much as I have with their latest, A Thousand Suns, a sort of concept record inspired by, of all things, the creation of teh atomic bomb. They had me at the Oppenheimer quotes that open the record. It must be my thing for post-apocalyptic fiction. At any rate, I love this song. “The hardest part of ending is starting again.”
#4#4: “FUCK YOU” by CEE-LO GREEN.
It’s every great bubblegum song from the 60s and 70s wrapped up in one great big four letter word. Is it gimmicky? Abso-effing-lutely. But it’s also deeply catchy and tremendously good-natured in the way that Top 40 pop rarely is these days. No surprise, really, with Bruno Mars on board as a co-writer. And the whole “Life Stages of the Lady Killer” video is, y’know, kinda heartwarming.
#3#3: “SHAME” by ROBBIE WILLIAMS & GARY BARLOW.
Imagine Justin Timberlake and JC Chassez getting together 20 years after “Bye Bye Bye” to hash things in sweet, folky harmonies. “Shame” is the story of the greatest boy band bromance ever speculated about. The song was the single released in conjunction with Robbie’s recent solo greatest hits retrospective, and it was released right as Robbie set his solo career aside to re-join his old pal Gary, and the rest of the 90s-era British boy band Take That. The video, which finds the two singing the song at a country bar karaoke night, plays on all the stereotypes about boy bands, and gets enticingly Brokebackish toward the end. Will it go there? It… just… might… (FTR… they’re both openly straight, even though most of the men in their audiences aren’t.)
#2#2: “DANCING ON MY OWN” by ROBYN.
High, double-edged drama in the wake of a bitter break-up. On one hand, here’s Robyn surreptitiously spying (err… stalking?) her ex with his new girl at the club. On the other, here’s Robyn dancing in the face of his rejection. Is it a moment of devastating weakness, or a moment of defiant strength? “I just came to say good-bye. I’m in the corner watching you kiss her.” That part where the beat drops out as she starts into the final chorus is just gut-wrenching. It’s the centerpiece of my favorite album of the year.
#1#1: “POWER” by KANYE WEST.
This year, Kanye West has become to hip-hop and maybe even popular music in general what Sarah Palin has become to politics. His is a presence to which attention must be paid. Always. Like Palin, he’s mastered the art of the provocatively self-serving tweet. Like Palin, he has a knack for saying really dumb things in really public ways. And like Palin, he is impervious to the valid criticisms and well-deserved attacks from the many many many many people for whom the mere mention of his name causes cringing, growling and gnashing of teeth. He revels in the outrage directed his way – “screams from the haters, got a nice ring to it” – and rather than defend himself against media missiles, he grabs a hold of them and turns them into weapons of offense. He’s almost certainly a narcissist, but he’s done what most narcissists fail to do – he’s made himself an object of our own sympathetic admiration. This year (and last), Kanye West has said and done things to make a fool of himself. But this year, he also made one of the year’s best and most fascinating records in the form of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Deal with that, you can almost hear Sarah – I mean Kanye – say, with an obnoxiously self-satisfied wink.
“Power” was the first song to be released from the album, arriving almost half a year before the album itself, and it’s a toweringly tacky piece of self-aggrandizement – a sonic pyramid of tribal chants and handclaps, mushroom cloud basslines, and arena-rock guitar heroism (and yes, that King Crimson sample) – but tucked into it, right at the end is this challenge: “Do you have the power to let power go?” Early in the song, he likens himself to a superhero, but like Superman, by the end of the song, he seems to come to understand that in order to experience life and love on any kind of real level – to be a real person, and not just a really wealthy, powerful man who can get himself all the “light-skinned girls” he wants – he has to give up his superpowers and concede some level of weakness, vulnerability, mortality. “This’ll be a beautiful death,” he sings, and instead of flying like Superman, he’s “dropping out the window, letting everything go.”
In a year when we saw firsthand, repeatedly, how the petulant whims of a single Senator could hold up progress on even the most popular and uncontroversial of legislative initiatives, West’s “Power” feels, strangely (since it’s coming from West), like a refreshingly sincere confessional on the moral limits of self-indulgence, from someone who seems to live life at the extremes of self-indulgence. Well played, Mr. West.
And that is all! This has been a great year for music, and it was painful tying to even make a list of “only” 100 great songs. Let’s hope 2011 can be even half as awesome. Happy New Year, folks! This is Paul’s Inner Casey Kasem signing off. Keep your feet on the ground, and keep reaching for your beers.
Ah, late night tweeting at its best. Sometimes, you have to be up late to catch all the good stuff.
On Thursday evening, Mr. West tweeted out a link to the remix to his latest single, Power. It was being sent around earlier in the day, but this was the official tweet.
Kanye West: OFFICIAL POWER REMIX http://www.kanyeuniversecity.com/blog/
That link is fine and dandy, but use this one instead. It’s a bit more direct.
It’s available to check out or download for free. Get it before it’s gone.
