THEN AGAIN, IT AIN’T ALL BAD NEWS: Lots of artists are fighting to fuck with racial boundaries, and this past year saw the well-deserved breakthrough of TV on the Radio, and works by Amos Lee, Lupe Fiasco, Gnarls Barkley, Georgia Anne Muldrow and Alice Smith stretched far beyond the rote boundaries of Top 40 black roleplay. Some of it even crash-landed on the charts. Crazy. (The Afro-punk movement also saw its profile rise with the long-awaited DVD release of James Spooner’s flawed but mandatory Afro Punk documentary.)
STARBUCKSY MUSIC WE CAN BACK: You didn’t need to be hipper-than-thou to find the good shit, though. Two artists nudged convention from the inside out, creating music just as rewarding and, in its own way, eccentric as those listed above.
He’s James Brown, bitch. (Photo by Barry Wilson)
OutKast, but hardly outcasts (Michael Tackett/Universal Pictures)
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L.A.’s own Aloe Blacc repped for the modern Afro-Latino experience with his debut CD, Shine Through (Stones Throw), a mélange of R&B, hip-hop, Latin rhythms and Blacc’s own idiosyncrasies. It reminded you how multitiered and soulful real R&B can be. Playful. Sexy. Funny. Smart and witty. Drawing from a wealth of influences and making them a seamless whole. It’s wonderful.
The other was the self-titled, Grammy-nominated disc by biracial British rose Corinne Bailey Rae, dubbed Snorin’ Bailey Rae by her detractors. The diss is understandable, but I liked the CD — and Rae’s grainy-sweet voice — the first time I heard it. Let yourself be pulled into the music, and it subtly yields its DNA — the gospel choir Rae sang in as a child, the indie-rock band she was in as a Zeppelin-obsessed teen, and the degree in English lit that peers through her lyrics.
But it was seeing the singer-songwriter live that made me a hardcore fan. At one point in her L.A. debut last year, she sat on the edge of a stool, accompanied by just a guitar as she sang “Like a Star.” Near the song’s end she closed her eyes, leaned her head back and stretched out her arms as she dug deep into the song’s words. You could see her thigh muscle flex through the thin material of her dress as she pumped her foot to keep time. Beyoncé, Rihanna, Ciara .?.?. never in their lives have any of them been that organically sexy.
But beyond that, this was soul music: the kind of art that was once synonymous with “black music” and is now almost its antithesis. It moved me.
FINAL QUOTE OF THE YEAR: “He had that combination, you know, of that soul and that deep sophistication. Oh, man. You know, they say that soul is when you have the ability to make other people feel better about being alive, regardless of their condition.”
—Wynton Marsalis, on60 Minutes’ tribute to Ed Bradley
