Word: spells
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Maxwell's nuanced new CD might not make as big a chart splash as Hill's, and it might be dismissed by some as overly subtle. However, the album's subdued tone shouldn't be misread as timidity. Maxwell wants to draw you in, cast a spell, and by singing in falsetto, by crooning and cooing, by whispering his way through songs, he forces listeners to really listen, to confront the emotions in his songs rather than avoid them through the cathartic escape hatch of volume. One song, the gorgeous, unhurried Submerge: Til We Become the Sun, is an abstractly...
...marital life was blameless except for one intense affair in the 1860s with a young Greek woman named Maria Zambaco, daughter of one of his London patrons. He cast her as a full-blown Medusan charmer, snakes twisting in her hair, and himself as the weakened magician under her spell, in The Beguiling of Merlin, 1873-74--King Arthur's court sorcerer reduced to hollow-eyed impotence by a magic fiercer than his own. "Now isn't that very funny," he wrote to a friend 20 years after finishing it, "as [Zambaco] was born at the foot of Olympus...
...GAMBLE A SPELL...
...call for recognition and appreciation--Franklin helped complete the task begun by Billie Holiday and others, converting American pop from a patriarchal monologue into a coed dialogue. Women were no longer just going to stand around and sing about broken hearts; they were going to demand respect, and even spell it out for you if there was some part of that word you didn't understand. As Franklin declares on Do Right Woman--Do Right Man: "A woman's... not just a plaything/ She's flesh and blood just like a man." Respect also became a civil rights anthem...
That was soon all too clear. Pop culture, once the domain of allusion--the cunning metaphor, the fade-out after that first kiss--now needed to spell and shout it out, as culture exploited every renegade adolescent impulse. The escape into elegance was replaced by the fun house of sensuality. In the new gross-out culture, bad taste was the official taste. Sit-com kids, once kittens and princesses, went rampantly rude. The inner child was triumphant--hear him roar...