Anita Baker
Jun. 16th, 2020 06:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzy_daveA couple of sultry grooves from Anita Baker -
Anita Baker - Angel
Anita Baker - Caught Up in the Rapture
Anita Baker's first LP The Songstress (Beverly Glen, 1983) was a brilliant vocal debut. Her slurred phrases, moans , screams, and use of melisma - taking those vowels through all kinds of unexpected twists and intervallic jumps - were a fabulous display of Gospel techniques used in a secular context (and the listener's sense of jouissance was possibly a resonance of the singer's own enactment of a self on the point of dissolution - originally, in possession by the spirit; here in overwhelming emotion).
Rapture, her second LP, is also full of excellent singing, but its effect has been a little muted. What's happened is that the focus on the voice has been softened: whereas on The Songstress, the production and arrangements served to highlight the voice, on Rapture they frame it, so containing its power; strings, keyboards, and backing vocals arc more prominent, matching and sometimes anticipating (interpreting) the voice. In Barthesian terms , the instrumental "phenosong" has started to mediate the vocal "genosong': a shift which possibly reflects Anita Baker's move from a small label catering chiefly for a Black audience to a corporation that deals in commercial music for a mass, white-dominated market. Certainly, arrangements like these - lush, slick, a cliched gesture of sophistication - are one of the means with which, historically, white Western pop has tried to "commercialise*- i.e undermine the (spiritual) power of Black music. Of the two albums I prefer the first but both are great albums.
Anita Baker - No More Tears
Enjoy.
Anita Baker - Angel
Anita Baker - Caught Up in the Rapture
Anita Baker's first LP The Songstress (Beverly Glen, 1983) was a brilliant vocal debut. Her slurred phrases, moans , screams, and use of melisma - taking those vowels through all kinds of unexpected twists and intervallic jumps - were a fabulous display of Gospel techniques used in a secular context (and the listener's sense of jouissance was possibly a resonance of the singer's own enactment of a self on the point of dissolution - originally, in possession by the spirit; here in overwhelming emotion).
Rapture, her second LP, is also full of excellent singing, but its effect has been a little muted. What's happened is that the focus on the voice has been softened: whereas on The Songstress, the production and arrangements served to highlight the voice, on Rapture they frame it, so containing its power; strings, keyboards, and backing vocals arc more prominent, matching and sometimes anticipating (interpreting) the voice. In Barthesian terms , the instrumental "phenosong" has started to mediate the vocal "genosong': a shift which possibly reflects Anita Baker's move from a small label catering chiefly for a Black audience to a corporation that deals in commercial music for a mass, white-dominated market. Certainly, arrangements like these - lush, slick, a cliched gesture of sophistication - are one of the means with which, historically, white Western pop has tried to "commercialise*- i.e undermine the (spiritual) power of Black music. Of the two albums I prefer the first but both are great albums.
Anita Baker - No More Tears
Enjoy.
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