Suddenly remembered this S.O.S. Band deep cut from their 1982 album III....
It has this clipped, staccato melody thing, that would be taken to the limit in their biggest (UK) hits "Just Be Good To Me" and "The Finest". Something I particularly associate with Jam & Lewis's songwriting for them and others (although in the case of "Looking For You" it's not actually written by them)
A post-Chic style of "melodic spacing," as discussed earlier here.
What's cool about "Looking for You" is that the staccato feel is really strong in the verses, as opposed to where it usually sits, the chorus. (The chorus in "Looking For You" is actually a little blah). In the verses, the choppiness creates a lurching quality that matches the song-character's frantic lovelorn / lover-lost state of mind. That desperation is further supported by an equally jutting distorted rock-guitar riff, that - in tandem with the prickly rhythm guitar part - exacerbates the off-balance feeling. You picture a swivel-eyed person, literally looking around trying to spot their missing lover in the crowd... catching someone with a faint resemblance out of the corner of the eye and for a second hallucinating their face.
3 comments:
I'm gonna be a technological determinist here and say (as I previously did under another guise) that while this may indeed be an organic development in R&B songwriting, I'd say it was more likely the result of in the studio advances. I think I said MIDI before, but the appearance of the click-track (circa 1979, I think) may be more pertinent. I know you mentioned Chic as being perhaps the ur-source of this sort of thing, but I'm not sure that their 70s output does display what you've identified. Chic's early 80s stuff, maybe. Good SOS Band tune, mind. I'd never heard it before. Definite shades of 'The Finest'.
I can't see a group as tight and disciplined as Chic needing a click track! But given that they became widespread in studios during this era, or slightly earlier (apparently Jefferson Airplane used a click!) you would then have to wonder why didn't everyone start writing tunes with this quality? In fact, you have the opposite: even as music gets more sequenced and digitally slaved to the grid, you have the rise of a post-Whitney/Mariah cult of supermelismatic "frilly" singing and a slippery, legato style of vocal with new jack swing and onwards.
So I would say that what I'm talking about is a deliberate aesthetic preference rather than a byproduct of technology. Think of the melody to "Good Times" from 1979. Not just the chorus but the verse melody too. No long held notes, no melisma. Discernible gaps between notes, each sung note like a taut dab of sound. There's a almost prim clipped-ness. A delicious tension is created by the relative non-fluidity of the melody line (which is also a horizontal melody, not a vertical one - its catchiness is through the rhythmic patterning rather than moving up and down and around the octave).
These are characteristics of nearly all of their big hits for Chic and Sister Sledge.
I happening to be listening to a James Brown song at this minute and while the backing has the taut, clipped precision, JB's singing is a lot more expressive and soul-y - woooahaha baaaabeee, vocal blurts that stretch across many notes. The singing smears out into gasped breathy moans. Not quite 90s-onwards levels of melisma but very different from the Chic style of vocal melody.
Yes, thanks Simon, I understand better where you're coming from! Also, at least by the early 80s, maybe rap stylings were becoming a consideration among/an influence on R&B songwriters . . .
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