Word: ballads
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...over 30 hit singles, including 1978's You Don't Bring Me Flowers, a duet with Barbra Streisand. Diamond loyalists right now are making their boy's latest efforts two of the year's hottest records. Love on the Rocks, a typically canny Diamond ballad, is currently No. 2 on the charts, while the album it comes from, The Jazz Singer, is fifth among the top LPs. Gratifying as this may be, at least one question remains: How come all the people who are buying The Jazz Singer are going in only modest numbers...
...with I'm the Man, the songs on Beat Crazy form an almost unbroken whole; a tune hardly has the chance to fade before another sneaks in. He perfects his delivery on "One to One". The ballad begins with a single organ chord, grows into a piano piece on loss of individuality, and recedes to its original chord. Thus, without breaking his train of musical thought, Jackson draws us into his musical continuum...
...commercialization, rock and roll slunk away from the topic of war. America's popular music forgot about Vietnam long before the last helicopters left, and by the mid-'70s war appeared on disc only as tongue-in-cheek posing--the Ramones sang "Blitzkrieg Bop" in 1976--or historical ballad--Al Stewart's "Roads to Moscow...
Side One finishes with "Indian Girl," a pleasantly poignant ballad with a fine horn arrangement by Old Stones associate Jack Nitzsche. Frankly, I can't get a handle on it--it seems to be a vague diatribe against Soviet imperialism and Fidel Castro. Which would make sense, since both Castro and Jagger were recently named to the list of the Ten Coolest People in the World*. Rivalry, then, would explain...
...Emotional Rescue" is the thematic culmination of the album. The tracks that follow, "She' So Cold," a delightful bopper, and "All About You." a ballad groaned by Keef, only reiterate the misogyny of the rest of the album. Misogyny is somewhat unacceptable these days, in light of the feminist revolution and the general ideological relativism of the 20th Century. But it is by no means a ridiculous or indefensible position. It is, in fact, a fundamentally religious position, which sees a world of the Many distracting man from the One; Jagger only goes further by equating women with the world...