It's always around this time during the last dayz of the calendar that us music writers get a chance to show the world what arbiters of great taste we are and compile our year-end Top 10 lists for the Village Voice's Pazz & Jop poll. It's very nice of the Voice to continue to accept my submissions. I'd figured that the rest of the ego trip People and myself were officially excommunicated from the process a few years back after we pooled our voting points - uh, I mean coincidentally allotted the maximum points on each of our ballots - to ensure that ego trip's The Big Playback (still the best hip-hop compilation of all-time despite Robert Christgau deeming it merely **-worthy) would receive its deserved spot in that year's top 100 albums. (Boy, was the Dean mad about that one!)
I'm not gonna waste your time going over what I picked and why. (You can supposedly see everyone's individual ballots on-line now - so much for voter privacy rights; I thought this was America, people.) But I will waste your time with a few random thoughts on the conspicuous absence of this year's critical darling retro-soul project, Raphael Saadiq's The Way I See It, from my picks. I know a lot of music writer folks are fond of it. Initially I too was on the bandwagon. On paper anyways it's right in my wheelhouse: proto-neo-soul-artist-whose-stuff-I-always-dug executes spot-on Motown-type tribute record. When an unsolicited commercial copy CD arrived in the mail from the label (a feat in itself) I listened to it. I enjoyed it. I listened to and enjoyed it enough to believe that I really liked it. Enough that I should cop the wax (because if you really like a record and you're me you need to own it on wax).
Unfortunately, I learned that the album was only pressed on single vinyl, thus the sound was apparently thinner than the defense's arguments in either O.J. trial. (Geez, it's a wonder any of us vinyl-worshippers figured out Step in the Arena or Fear of a Black Planet were great albums BITD given how lousy they sounded on the those single vinyl pressings.) Fortunately, someone involved in Raphael Saadiq's project was thinking about those of us who care about such things. As it turned out the album was also available as a limited edition box set of 45s. Now we were talking: additional sonic punch, a collectibility factor - pretty much an automatic purchase for me. I promptly ordered one from everyone's favorite on-line outlet for hyperbolic descriptive language, dustygroove.com, and thought to myself, wow, isn't it swell when things go the way you wished they would?
A week or so later when it arrived in the mail, however, I got the immediate sense that something was off. The 45s all had these cheesy picture sleeves that kept reminding me of this. There was the fact that the songs didn't follow the running order of the album but were paired with one another as A and B-sides sort of arbitrarily. There was the unfortunate inclusion of that song with the horrific guest verse from Jay-Z (features from whom I now look forward to about as much as trips to the dentist). Most importantly there was the material itself, which - now subject to more scrutiny as individual songs - just wasn't really doing it for me anymore. In his attempt to capture vintage Motown I was beginning to believe dude did it in a way that maybe he wasn't bargaining for. You know how those pre-What's Going On albums were basically two great singles and a bunch of decent but dispensable filler? Suddenly for me the album sounded sort of like one of those, but without the great singles.
In all fairness I know this wasn't how the record was meant to be experienced. So maybe the fact that none of the songs stand out to me when I listen to them as 7s means that this is a case of the sum being greater than the individual parts. Maybe it's still a good album. But honestly I haven't felt compelled to listen to it in any format since that 45s box set showed up on my doorstep over a month ago.
Damn you, vinyl. You've got me so wrapped around your finger I don't even know what to think sometimes.
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