Commercial-isms: BlackBerry Playbook vs. The Temptations

July 21, 2011

The new ad campaign for the roll-out of BlackBerry’s PlayBook tablet is based around a long-forgotten song – a flop upon its release – by a vocal group who, while regarded as legendary today, was generally (and sort of accurately) considered a bunch of has-beens when they recorded it all of 31 years ago. First of all: Thank You, BlackBerry! Your taste in music is awesome. Secondly: Good luck with that.

When we think of The Temptations, there are two different incarnations that come to mind. There’s the early-mid-60s Smokey Robinson-produced Temptations, who, after toiling away fairly fruitlessly in Motown’s gold (record) mines for nearly three years, finally hit the motherlode with ebullient pop ditties like “The Way You Do The Things You Do” and the lovely, beaming “My Girl”.

Then there’s the darker, funkier Norman Whitfield Temptations of the late 60s and early 70s, defined by its flights of social commentary set to increasingly elaborate and psychedelic orchestrations. These were songs that sounded spacey and felt spacious, draped in echoes and strings and deep, almost subliminal basslines, culminating in the twin peaks of “Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)”, a lushly harmonized, string-bedded, ballad of wishful thinking so beautifully and precisely realized it’s almost physically painful (in the best possible way) to hear, and the 1973 epic “Papa Was a Rolling Stone”, a song The Temptations didn’t even get the first stab at (Whitfield had recorded it with The Undisputed Truth a year earlier), but which remains one of the group’s most iconic hits.

But The Temptations discography gets a little fuzzy after that. In fact, though The Temptations, amidst myriad personnel changes, continued recording on a fairly regular basis well into the 90s (they still pop out an album every now and then), they’ve never come close to their earlier successes, and virtually everything they’ve recorded since, say, 1975, has gone largely forgotten, even by many Temptations anthologies. Which makes hearing their 1980 single “Power” on a new commercial for BlackBerry’s PlayBook tablet such a great surprise.

Anchored by the late great Melvin Franklin’s distinctive “po-ower, poom, poom” vocal bassline, “Power” is a fire-and-brimstone gospel sermon delivered over a just-past-disco groove by Dennis Edwards in full-on revival preacher mode: “All you poor!” Edwards declaims, “All you needy! All you’re doin’ is givin’ to the greedy!” The song clearly spoke to its own end-of-the-Carter-era moment although its prescription for salvation pointedly disincludes anything about, say, electing Republican candidates to national office. It’s more about giving glory to God than giving glory to people who pay God lip service. 30-plus years later, it feels utterly true to the weird conflation of religious zeal and the mightily propagandized fiscal policy panic of 2011. Go, BlackBerry!

The song was to have been the group’s great comeback single: Like The Spinners before them, The Temptations left Motown in the mid-70s to record for Ahmet Ertegun’s Atlantic label. They were one of the last of the classic Motown acts to either disband or defect from Motown. But unlike the Spinners who found their greatest success on Atlantic with an enviable string of hits between 1972 to 1980, The Temptations’ Atlantic tenure was brief and depressingly hitless. PlayBook! Yes!

It was Berry Gordy himself who’d wooed the The Temptations back to the fold with “Power”, a song he’d co-written, which he’d claimed to have been sitting on because he didn’t have anyone like The Temptations to record it. Gordy produced the track with a hearty nod to the group’s Norman Whitfield heyday, and it became the title track of the group’s 1980 homecoming album.

But even though “Power” became the group’s biggest hit in 5 years (and, sadly, it remains the group’s best charting single since their return to Motown), it stalled just outside of Billboard’s Top 40. The hedonistic days of disco weren’t yet a distant memory, and the song’s fate seems to speak more to pop radio’s BeeGees hangover than the song’s quality: people just weren’t ready to hear something this sincerely angry just yet – not on Top 40 radio at least. Which makes the song’s Age of AutoTune resurrection in the form of a national ad campaign for a semi-snazzy (although somewhat late-to-the-party, it seems) new tech gadget one of the sweeter, most out-of-nowhere musical surprises of this year. Hear the song in all its righteous fury here:

Stephen King’s “The Stand”: An Epic Showdown of Good vs. Evil (Music)

April 4, 2011

Though I’m sure he’s done okay for himself as a novelist, I’ve always believed that deep down inside, Stephen King really always dreamed of being a rock star. Or barring that – there is, after all, the matter of his looks – a rockin’ rollin’ DJ in the 50s mode, when local DJs were bigger rock stars than the rock stars themselves. When I was in junior high and high school, I spent a lot of time reading Stephen King’s books and one of the things I remember loving – in fact, the one thing that drew me to his books long after the stories themselves ceased to interest me was the way he worked music into them. (I loved a lot of Robert Cormier’s books for the same reason – he introduced me to the Stones’ “19th Nervous Breakdown” via his novel I Am the Cheese, at a time when those old British fogies were bogged down in crud like “One Hit to the Body” and nothing could seem less cool than a Rolling Stones song to a 10-year-old whose musical memory ended somewhere between Andy Gibb and Captain & Tennille.)

A lot of times, King’s inner DJ came out in the epigram (or three) at the beginning of each book (and maybe each chapter of the book too) – a stanza from Dylan, a couplet from CCR, etc. But Stephen King was also never above letting his characters give his inner record critic a voice. And it was a critic of the old school “rockist” variety. I can’t remember exactly which book it is (The Tommyknockers?), but I remember feeling awfully put out when one of his characters thought to himself, upon hearing T. Rex’s “Bang A Gong”, that Marc Bolan was better off dead in a world where the Power Station could cover his glam rock anthem.

Yesterday, the Syfy Channel devoted its entire programming schedule to movies (or rather, made-for-TV miniseries) adapted from Stephen King stories, and I am sad to report that I spent very nearly 8 hours (interrupted only by a quick trip to Pizza Hut) watching “The Stand”, an epic in four two-hour parts starring Rob Lowe as a deaf mute, Gary Sinise as a reluctant prophet, and Molly Ringwald as a Mary figure – hers is not a virgin pregnancy, but the baby’s father was killed in a massive superflu plague that wiped out most all of humanity. Like the massive 1978 novel it was based on (made even massiver when a “complete and uncut edition” was published 12 years later), the miniseries is a pulpy vision of an apocalyptic showdown between good and evil in the Great American West, with the devil (incarnate as a man called Randall Flagg) setting up shop in Las Vegas (surprise!) and the righteous, led by a mystical, 106-year-old black woman who plays guitar and sings hymns on her porch (didn’t see that one coming, did you?) flocking to a land of milk and honey called Boulder, Colorado.

Stephen King wrote the tele-play for the series and there are times when I wonder if he was being intentionally unintentionally hilarious with the dialog. Bill Fagerbakke (better known to folks my age as that big dimwitted Dauber from Coach, and to the kids of folks my age as the voice of Patrick Star) gets the best worst line when, playing to type as simpleton-with-a-heart-of-gold Tom Cullen, he laments (I’m paraphrasing), “I hate being a retard.” Several times, I got the feeling that this movie would be so much more fun if I could watch it in the same room with Sarah Palin. Stephen King even makes a cameo!

And then I noticed that Stephen King’s inner rock critic also makes a cameo. In the opening scene of the second part, we see Mother Molly Ringwald listening to Crowded House’s “Don’t Dream It’s Over” on a turntable. Meanwhile, another one of his heroes is Larry Underwood, an aspiring musician who carries a guitar on his back. In one scene, he sits on the hood of a car singing 60s folkie Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” while Des Moines burns in the background. On the other hand, here’s one Harold Lauder, an insecure nerd (and unwitting minion of Satan – you can tell by his studded leather jacket) who’s never recovered from high school, plotting a terrorist attack on the “Free Zone” to exact revenge on Molly Ringwald for rejecting his affections in favor of Gary Sinise. And what’s Harold playing (on a cassette, no less!) while he’s building his bomb in the basement? The Sylvers’ “Boogie Fever”. The message of the movie couldn’t be clearer! Acoustic folk rock singer-songwriters, good. Disco: evil. Whoever said that rock n’ roll is the devil’s music?

Then again, the message gets muddy during the climactic final battle between the forces of good and evil. Larry Underwood, one of three emissaries from the Free Zone sent to represent in the final battle against Randall Flagg in Las Vegas, is first arrested, and then besieged by a bloodthirsty mob. At one point, one of Flagg’s henchman confiscates Larry’s guitar and smashes it to bits, shouting “Disco is dead!”

The Daily Awesome – January 31, 2011: “Blizzard of ’78″ by Ida (2001)

January 31, 2011

A couple weeks ago, friend of SonicClash and Popblerd blogger Mike Heyliger asked folks to name songs about snow that weren’t Christmas songs. Here’s one of my favorites – “Blizzard of ’78″ by the indie rock quartet Ida. This 7 minute epic was the centerpiece of the group’s 2001 album The Braille Night. The song is as stormy as its title would suggest, driven forward by an endlessly repeated descending chord progression pounded out on a piano over groaning strings and a noisy snare-and-cymbals rhythmic attack. And as singers Elisabeth Mitchell, Daniel Littleton, and Karla “k.” Schickele sing the song’s chorus – “You’re a thousand miles from here, you just want to disappear” – in beautiful, shifting, increasingly urgent harmonies, you can almost feel yourself trudging down a snow-covered city sidewalk face-first into a punishing, icy wind. In other words, it sounds just like what a blizzard feels like, even if the lyrics seem less about snow and more about someone trying to overcome stage fright. But it’s the evocation that counts, right? And it’s probably one of my Top 10 favorite songs of the last decade. Click the link below to give it a listen for yourself:

Blizzard of 78

Next Page »