Old school is back — and not one Brian McKnight record too soon. Soul music is back in style thanks to artists like Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings. They're making music with real drum sets and punchy horn sections, not the turntables and drum pads of contemporary R&B and neo-soul. Hey, even Seal has a new album of '60s and '70s covers simply called "Soul" (2008).
Raphael Saadiq, a longtime neo-soul singer with strong, versatile pipes, released an album last fall that will fly out of your computer speakers like it's coming off vinyl. At its best, "The Way I See It" (2008) can feel like a condensation of soul music's greatest moments while retaining a welcome freshness all the while.
Saadiq draws on so many influences that it's really impossible to find a particular album by one artist that is appropriate for direct comparison; first, I tried James Brown's "Live at the Apollo Theater" (1963) — but Saadiq sings with elegance, not Brown's on-your-knees abandon. Then I went for Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions' "The Anthology" (1992) — that was closer, but too limited to account for all the influences on "The Way I See It." This album draws on almost the entire Motown sound in its various incarnations over the years, so the best "parent" that I could find for this column was "Motown 1's" (2004), the tastefully chosen collection of hits from the Detroit label that helped craft the soul genre.
On this compilation, you'll trip over the roots of Saadiq's vocal sound everywhere: Stevie Wonder's high-climbing, rapturous voice, audible on "Uptight (Everything's Alright);" Smokey Robinson's silky alto, featured twice on "1's;" and Marvin Gaye's sexiness, most apparent, of course, on "Let's Get It On."
The instrumentals on "The Way I See It" essentially run the gamut of the Motown collection, taking equal cues from the saxophone-driven, fast strut of "Heat Wave" by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas and the guitar-and-strings sweetness of "I Want You Back" by the Jackson 5. But Saadiq adds something — sometimes subtly, sometimes plainly — to the retro sound. He's clearly a neo-soul artist, and the drum sound owes as much to Questlove of the Roots as to the Funk Brothers. Unapologetic throwbacks "Sure Hope You Mean It" and "100 Yard Dash" don't make it back to the '60s without getting a scrap of Macy Gray's (mostly overlooked) neo-soul gem, "On How Life Is" (1999), caught in the time machine with them.
The songs on Saadiq's latest are brief, but hey, that's how they did it in the old days. He doesn't bother with bridges or huge dynamic changes, but the album recovers because it proves surprisingly heterogeneous from song to song.
Messages of social change, often critical aspects of classic soul, make brief appearances on Saadiq's record, such as on tracks three and four, the swinging "Keep Marchin'" and the bayou-shuffling "Big Easy," an ode to a lover swept up in Katrina's waters. A greater showing would have been welcome from Saadiq, especially at a time when a wake-up call is necessary; after all, one election cannot mean that all racial inequalities have been eradicated, and it's surely not the ultimate realization of one leader's famous dream, as many have claimed.
Both "1's" and "The Way I See It" serve as excellent gateways into soul music fanhood — Saadiq's, because it bridges today and yesterday explicitly yet gracefully, and "1's," because it's simply a strikingly comprehensive compilation of the best number-one hits Motown Records ever produced.
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Giovanni Russonello is a junior majoring in history. He can be reached at Giovanni.Russonello@tufts.edu.
