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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。
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。
