While the surging popularity of rap music represents a brash, youthful rebellion against the pop mainstream, polished, ultra-romantic pop-soul singing continues to hold its own in the black music marketplace. On Billboard`s ”top black albums” chart last week, the two best-selling records –Freddie Jackson`s ”Just Like the First Time” (Capitol 12495; LP;
cassette) and Luther Vandross` ”Give Me the Reason” (Epic 40415; LP;
cassette)–are quintessential examples of a cultivated male pop-soul vocal style that is so prevalent it has become a full-blown genre.
”Gregory Abbott” (Columbia 40437), the debut album of another New York balladeer, stood at No. 5. And the Caribbean-born, English-based pop-soul singer Billy Ocean recently scored his second million-selling album with
”Love Zone” (Jive-Arista 8409; LP, cassette, compact disc), a record also dominated by love ballads.
”Give Me the Reason” is the fifth consecutive solo album by Vandross to sell more than a million copies, and he is the unchallenged master of a genre he did more than anyone else to create and popularize. Although he has always cited female pop-soul singers–specifically the Shirelles, Dionne Warwick and Diana Ross–as role models, historically Vandross stands in an artistic line of descent whose pre-eminent forerunners were Ray Charles in the `50s and early `60s and Marvin Gaye in the `60s and `70s. While retaining their rich, full-voiced vocal delivery, Vandross has delineated a fresh balance between declamation and crooning that tilts toward the soft, and the singer elaborately sets up a song`s dramatic climaxes.
Since the birth of soul music, black male singers have usually chosen one of two directions, one rough, the other smooth, and both suggested by the archetypal soul man, Ray Charles. When the soul-music movement reached its zenith in the late 1960s, the charging, uninhibited shouts of singers like James Brown, Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding could be traced back to the uptempo gospel-blues of Charles and Little Richard. Vandross, Jackson, Abbott and Ocean are all descended from smoother side–the crying pop-blues balladeer of ”Georgia On My Mind” and ”I Can`t Stop Loving You.” In varying degrees and in different ways, they have adapted and refined his freewheeling style of rich, loamy pop-blues lamentation into a studio vocal approach that is almost operatic in its detailed shading and intonation.
Vandross`s fifth album, ”Give Me the Reason,” continues the singer-songwriter-producer`s subtle shift away from declamatory singing toward a more rococo, pastel-shaded impressionism. Unlike his contemporaries, Vandross doesn`t simply write and record songs. He designs seamless aural environments in which the sequencing of the material makes each album resemble an extended pop tone poem for voice and studio musicians. The individual songs on Vandross` album don`t adhere to the tightly compressed formats of typical pop- soul ballads. Because Vandross interpolates and improvises as he goes along, the lines separating a song`s verse, chorus and bridge aren`t always clearly defined. And the overall feeling of his music is unusually spacious.
Vandross` song lyrics–romantic catch phrases with a gently teasing edge
–are springboards for casual vocal pyrotechnics expressing an emotional volatility that shifts in mood from sweetly abject to playfully accusatory, as the singer adjusts his vocal color and intonation. One moment the voice is a soft cottony purr, the next a silky cry. With masterful agility, Vandross leaps from a mellow upper baritone into a delicate falsetto and back.
On ”Give Me the Reason,” Vandross plays a vocal cat-and-mouse game with his female back-up singers in teasing calls and responses, as delicate instrumental fragments fade in and out of the picture. In ”There`s Nothing Better than Love,” a duet with Gregory Hines, whose debut album Vandross is scheduled to produce, Hines becomes Vandross` vocal alter ego.
As on most of Vandross` previous albums, the new record concludes with a favorite pop-soul standard, in this case his version of Dionne Warwick`s first major hit, ”Anyone Who Had a Heart.” But instead of treating the song as an urgent plea to an insensitive lover, Vandross gives the song a languid, attenuated reading that dissipates its tension. He turns it into a passive, solitary reverie in which the voice meanders moodily through a soft-focus musical setting, rising momentarily to passionate heights, then flattening out in interludes of light, soulful scat that carry the emotional weight of wordless interior monologue. The cut is a charmingly eccentric tour-de-force. Vandross is not the first pop-soul artist to make albums that suggest self-contained romantic dream worlds. Barry White`s early 70s proto-disco records and Isaac Hayes`s heavy-breathing erotic soundtracks also conjured up personal romantic playgrounds. But Vandross has carried the concept to a considerably higher level of sophistication and subtlety.
Like Luther Vandross, Freddie Jackson is a native New Yorker who made his name as a romantic balladeer who decorates songs by interpolating long melismatic embellishments. While Jackson has consciously borrowed some of Vandross` techniques, his pop instincts are much more conventional. Jackson has a sharper, more aggressive vocal attack than Vandross, and his declamatory singing has a keen, compelling metallic twang. Both ”Tasty Love” and ”Look Around,” the two best songs on his new album, underscore the difference between the two singers. ”Tasty Love” expertly recycles the Caribbean groove and erotic spirit of Marvin Gaye`s ”Sexual Healing.” The plaintive pop-soul ballad ”Look Around” features striking small embellishments by the singer in his upper tenor register.
Billy Ocean, the Trinidad-born, London based singer-songwriter, shares with Vandross and Jackson a rich, full delivery heavily tinged with romantic pathos. But in his relatively unsyncopated phrasing and less refined timbre, Ocean is blunt where his New York counterparts are insinuating. ”When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going,” from the soundtrack of ”The Jewel of the Nile,” surges with a stomping, burly machismo. And his lusty ballad singing has a thick reedy timbre strongly reminiscent of the Welsh pop star Tom Jones.
The tastes of Ocean and his producers and songwriting collaborators, Barry J. Eastmond and Wayne Brathwaite, run toward solid formula ballads with simple, emphatic tunes and slogging rhythms. The arrangements are surefooted
`80s updates of the sound of the Temptations hits of 15 to 20 years ago.
”Shake You Down,” the debut album of the New York singer Gregory Abbott, has already yielded a top-10 hit in the title tune, another song blatantly patterned in its rhythm and mood after Marvin Gaye`s ”Sexual Healing.”
But the album, which Abbott produced himself, is a somewhat tinny-sounding, low-budget affair whose tunes rarely transcend narrow formulas.
