于是的音乐

The Long War Sade soldiers on. by Sasha Frere-Jones March 22, 2010 It sounds implausible now, but there was a time when soft jazz was almost radical. This brief moment should be credited largely to the English. In the early eighties, groups like Everything but the Girl and the Style Council developed a hybrid kind of pop that drew from the more plangent side of soul and jazz—think of an area triangulated by the Delfonics, Dave Brubeck, and Chet Baker. Their style was a marked departure from the dominant sounds of the charts: Madonna’s blocky drum machines and the noisy guitar bands of the third or fourth wave after punk. In this overheated context, playing mellifluous, unthreatening versions of soul and jazz could surprise, maybe even shock. It was several years before the release of David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet,” and years further from cabaret retro becoming a calcified style. One act in particular understood the potential of going quiet, and eventually made its lead singer the most successful female solo artist in British history, with more than fifty million albums sold. Sade was born Helen Folasade Adu in Nigeria, to a Nigerian academic and an English nurse, in 1959. When she was four, her parents split and she moved to England with her mother, spending most of her childhood in the seaside resort of Clacton-on-Sea. After college, at St. Martins School of Art, in London, Adu joined a band called Pride, which played Latin soul and various iterations of a genre that would later be called acid jazz, though it was anything but acerbic. Several musicians in Pride became her backing band, and together they went by the name she used for herself—Sade, pronounced “sha-DAY,” to the consternation of radio d.j.s across the world. Signed to Epic Records on the strength of the appropriately titled song “Smooth Operator,” Sade and her band became the benchmark for smoothness. With her group—the saxophonist Stuart Matthewman, the keyboardist Andrew Hale, and the bassist Paul Denman—Sade has created one of the most profitable catalogues in pop, while appearing in public so rarely that her friends have nicknamed her Howie, after Howard Hughes. Exactly how much do people want the Sade sound? The new Sade album, “Soldier of Love,” separated from the group’s last studio release by ten years (in pop years, many generations), spent three weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard chart. In this commercially unstable moment, when a popular album is lucky to spend one week at the top, that’s no minor feat, especially for a fifty-one-year-old woman who is entirely absent from the gossip centrifuge. What is the formula for her success? Discussing the looks of a female pop star always feels a bit reactionary; even the most evenhanded, politically committed critic probably doesn’t do it as often for male pop stars. Sade’s beauty, though, is not simply a matter for the gawkers and the sales department; there are very few faces like hers. She has pellucid, pale-cocoa skin, a large, gently curved forehead, and wide-set eyes, which, in 1983, made her look as close to a global citizen as anyone we’d seen. With nothing to go on but her light English accent, it was difficult to tell where she was from, making her a candidate to represent populations who usually didn’t get their own global pop stars. Sade, the band, could have sneaked a Situationist manifesto into its material while everyone sat still, hypnotized by the mystery of Sade, the person. Sade’s delightfully glittery début album, “Diamond Life,” was a bit like the perfect night of dress-up, everyone playing at jazz and secret-agent cool, an image that the videos did their best to establish over and over. That devilish smooth operator was playing with girls’ hearts, moving “in space with minimum waste and maximum joy.” A similar rake was also to be found over on the boat in Duran Duran’s “Rio” video. So what made Sade different? For starters, the pretty woman up front didn’t seem to give a damn about this Lothario, and was obviously twice the catch he was. We could already hear the graphite core in Sade’s voice, a grainy contralto full of air that betrays a slight ache but no agony, and values even imperfect dignity over a show of pain. (It is this quality, deeply English, that drives soul purists crazy when trying to categorize Sade.) Though her style wasn’t going to knock over anyone’s gimlet, it wasn’t necessarily dedicated to soothing, happy stories. The album closed with a cover of a minor soul classic, Timmy Thomas’s “Why Can’t We Live Together?,” a direct plea for racial harmony that hinted at a political sensibility, easier to hear in later songs about immigrant workers and slaves. And, as easy as the band’s sound has always been, Sade’s songs have tended toward exploring the heavier lifting inside love: commitment, consistency, friendship. The success of Sade and her anodyne band highlights one of the maddening aspects of popular music: no matter what musicians intend, music can often be a background element in a moment, in a way that books and movies can’t. Sculpture and painting, by virtue of never turning off, can pierce the familiarity of their surroundings. Albums end, and even when they were on they might simply have been part of the mood, whatever that was. You can hear the downside of all this on Sade’s 2002 live album, “Lovers Live,” where the background singers and horns keep things under control. Nothing, not even the chance to solo in front of thousands of screaming fans, can sway the band from its flatlining hum of reason and gentility. Never has a talented group of musicians been in such need of a few bursts of noise or gaps of painful silence. 高中时就开始听的好声音。现在年过半百照样好听。是很感叹啊。。。我一直觉得她的沙哑音色里有种杀伤力，尽管在这张专辑里比十多年前少了一点点。 我怕听Babyfather这首。别的都可以翻来覆去听，这首却不想。奇怪。

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慢悠悠的节奏，明亮亦伤怀的声音，并没有司空见惯的嘶哑。是听一遍就记住的声音。声音里有种不轻易爆发的力度。 是那种必须要听歌词的歌手。他在坦克里写下是哪首歌呢。很好奇，是因为他的歌总有背景，牵扯着和平盛世里的苟活者不能想象（抑或借助影视文学去想象）的情景和情感。 Goodbye my lover, Goodbye my friend这样的告别因由战争的背景，听来是否有不一样的痛。而且他唱的那么用力。 可以听到这样的单词清楚地吐露出来 dawn/dream/remeber/used to be/gun/father/children/fears/flowers/nothing new/love/butterfly/stay with me/cry on your shoulder/think about it again/wasting time........ 听到这样唱歌的人，我想到Bob Dylan，不用电音或实验，是那种原原本本信任歌声和文字的音乐。

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我喜欢椎名林檎已经好几年了。但毕竟不是具有时效性的。她最活跃时，我大概还在上大学，好像啥也不懂，从来没想过翻找日本的打口碟。 把评论写在这张碟名下，是因为这张名叫『苹果之歌』，是她『林檎』的名字。所以就当是我对她整个的好评记点吧。 据说，她之所以叫『林檎』（中文意：苹果），是因为中学时她害羞总是脸红。呵呵。 可最让我惊讶的是，最近终于看到她未出道时的一段演出，16岁的椎名尚未改名到林檎，她穿着老气横秋的黑色小晚礼服，手套是繁复网纹的，她的婴儿肥令我下巴遭受引力作用长达半分钟。也许出道时稚气的“故作老成”、肥肥的宽脸蛋，无论如何都不像是巨星的样子。那感觉，和看张曼玉、王菲早期的照片一样。我一直认为NANA的原型理应更像椎名而不是中岛。但事实证明，只有在漫画里，NANA才是与生俱来的。 那时候她已经很有（模仿）的味道。明明是很合适爵士的，却骨子里是Grunge的。 林檎的歌其实很简单，不是很故作姿态的。虽然也不得不强调形象的多变，但她爆发力的嗓音比什么都重要。她可能出道时是以英文歌主打的，她的英文咬字和发射词汇的速率都不是一般日本女歌手可比拟的，与其说是熟练，我觉得倒是一种任性的驾驭。 她的曲调简单干脆，与其说流畅，不是说是滚滚而来。 她的嗓子里似乎藏着好几个声场。 她的口哨也是如此，字正腔圆的，在歌舞伎女王的MV里伴着鬼鬼祟祟的黑猫、随地大小便的男孩、穿和服的哺乳妇人。。 记住，拿喇叭上场的必定是“本能”，那就是颤音的来源，比我想像的录音室效果器更简单。 病床（下克上）的LIVE是我最喜欢的，全体人员病员状，光影来自六孔无影灯，你会发现这种结构的光线真的更适合舞台，背影是血管状纠缠的红，话筒都是病院的白色。在她所有的发型之中，这种往前喷的短发是我最中意的。 到了2004的茎，她穿着和服矜持保守地梳着古典发型，很异国的英文念着花朵盛开，水墨动画中滚滚上升的桃花背后，鬓发零乱，犹如过剩的胭脂。之后更如法国CULT片。长条餐桌沿线的疯狂。 其实她有点像Candy卢巧音。一不小心，我喜欢上了三个长着方下巴的瘦女人，嗓音都沙哑得好听（第一个嘛。。已是人见人爱的了）。

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看了楼上两人的评论。才决定强调一下。我喜欢这张专辑，丝毫不亚于花火那张。 诚然咯，那些熟悉的字眼。但这不是问题。我们为什么要期许一个音乐人像只青蛙一样跳跃在所有新鲜而无谓的字眼上呢？为什么我们不支持一个人固执地偏爱一些能打动人心的字眼和隐喻和梦呢？ 我支持。 大街。大桥。长安街。石头。恒星。孤独。哭。孩子。怒放。。 这些词曲让我不可遏制地想到晚安北京的那一年。我想，他不变，几乎是福气了。 而且，歌好听。这比什么都要紧。配乐和节奏带着鲜明的风格，一下子找到他在你听觉和感动范围中的位置。这有什么不好呢。 也可能，是我现在比以前更脆弱了。所以，才感到能够打动自己的声音和字眼越来越少了。主题重复，哦～，这才不是问题。

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