Word: motown
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...lightweight, but it’s a winner. Grade: B UGK – “Int’l Players Anthem” The first verse is the best minute of music released this year. Andre 3000 delivers a tightwire flow over a beautiful Motown sample, and you remember that Outkast is very, very good. Then the drums kick in and the track turns into boilerplate, albeit well-executed, Southern rap, and you remember that this isn’t actually an Outkast song. The cognitive dissonance between sweet music and rough lyrics in the last three quarters...
...Svengalis are a noble and often valuable tradition. Berry Gordy was notoriously tyrannical during the heyday of Motown Records, but compare the timeless, distinctive singles the Four Tops or Diana Ross did for the label with the banal, forgettable ones they did after they left. Spector, for his part, brandished a gun in the studio, intimidating everyone around him. But the hits he crafted for the Ronettes and the Righteous Brothers are the music equivalent to the Sistine Chapel; the flimsy singles those acts (and many others) released after they broke with him are paint-by-numbers pop. As much...
...have heard it through the grapevine: the heiress to the Motown legacy has done it again. With her latest album, 19-year-old Brit Joss Stone reminds us just why we liked the ’70s so much. Don’t let the album’s title mislead you. “Introducing Joss Stone” is in fact Stone’s third solo album. And it shows—Stone sounds more mature than she did on either of her previous releases. The album is ambitious; bringing soul back is a touch more difficult...
...year ago, at age 64, with more than 40 years in the record business and a dozen Top 40 hits under her sequined belt, former Motown star Martha Reeves arrived at the moment every professional entertainer dreads. The phone didn't ring as often as before, and the concert bookings were thinning out. So Reeves did the same as millions of people in their 50s and 60s who are facing the end of a career they love: she looked around for a new one that could put to work the skills she had honed in her first. And that...
Reeves credits her ability to make the transition to politicking from performing to advice she got from Maxine Powell, the famed etiquette coach at Motown. Powell, who trained artists like Reeves, Smokey Robinson and Diana Ross in skills ranging from dealing with the media to knowing which fork to use at a formal dinner, emphasized the importance of being able to cope with change. "One thing Maxine always taught us," Reeves recalls, "is that you have to have a life outside of music. Invest in yourself some other way, she said, because you can lose the money and the fame...