“Party Rock Anthem,” the worldwide smash from electronic duo LMFAO’s sophomore album Sorry for Party Rocking, doesn’t make grand statements about American politics. It doesn’t show concern for people sleeping on the streets. It doesn’t consider our warming climate, or worry about daily commutes or paying bills. It offers neither commentary on the pains and joys of romance, nor profound statements about sex or death.
But it will make you dance.
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“Shotgun” is the Motown classic that sounds nothing at all like a Motown classic. Junior Walker and the All Stars’ roadhouse R&B juggernaut is untamed and unbound — a wild card in a catalog synonymous with sequinned style and silk-trimmed sophistication. Released on Motown’s Soul subsidiary in early 1965 (a pivotal year in the company’s commercial and creative ascent, thanks to crossover blockbusters including the Four Tops’ “I Can’t Help Myself [Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch]” and the Supremes’ “Stop! In the Name of Love”), “Shotgun” delivers gutbucket grooves to rival the grittiest, greasiest records from competitors Stax and Atlantic, but despite topping the Billboard R&B charts for four nonconsecutive weeks, it remains an outlier in the Motown canon, its primordial energy unmatched by the label before or after — a tantalizing taste of a more incendiary Motown Sound that might have been.
Producer and songwriter Norman Whitfield revolutionized the Motown Sound for a new age in music and culture, eschewing the ebullient R&B grooves that propelled the label’s commercial ascension in pursuit of something much deeper, darker and more daring. Working in partnership with Motown hitmakers like the Temptations and Marvin Gaye, Whitfield drew on contemporary influences including acid rock and funk to create a series of smash singles that explored the triumphs and tragedies shaping Black identity in civil rights-era America, architecting a singularly atmospheric sound retroactively dubbed “psychedelic soul.”
Read MoreWhen music critic Dave Marsh published his book The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made in 1989, he declared “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” the greatest single of them all — and as the years go by, the selection seems more and more unassailable. Marvin Gaye’s searing account of a man devastated to learn through the rumor mill of his lover’s infidelity “distills four hundred years of paranoia and talking drum gossip into three minutes and fifteen seconds of anguished soul-searching,” Marsh writes. “The proof’s as readily accessible as your next unexpected encounter on the radio with the fretful, self-absorbed vocal that makes the record a lost continent of music and emotion.”
As a song, “Here It Goes Again” is a footnote. But as a marketing stunt, it’s a milestone — a harbinger of a world where fame and fortune are measured in views, likes and shares, not record sales, radio airplay or downloads. Released online roughly a year prior to the introduction of Apple’s iPhone, the philosopher’s stone of the social media age, “Here It Goes Again” unleashed the power of viral video to chart a new path to celebrity, vividly demonstrating digital media’s unprecedented capacity to establish more direct connections between performers and audiences while disintermediating labels and broadcasters from the star-maker machinery.
Play “The Next Movement,” the 1999 single from the Roots’ fourth album Things Fall Apart, and from the first sliding hand clap, listeners at any party, cookout or kickback will stop mid-conversation, nod their heads in quiet appreciation, and allow the music to take them to a place where hip-hop returns to its roots.
“Fade Into You” is a dream-pop lullaby — a fugue-state meditation on love and longing that shimmers with the elusive beauty of a desert mirage. Released to radio in 1994, Mazzy Star’s signature hit really wasn’t a hit at all, falling four spots shy of the Billboard Top 40, but it endures like precious few records of its era: in fact, “Fade Into You” seems to exist outside of time and space altogether, echoing across the airwaves from the deepest reaches of consciousness.
