Week 4, The Spinners

I have good friend Alice Neiley to thank for this week's choice. In a back and forth conversation, she wondered if I had much experience with Motown. I informed her I did not. So she recommended the 1973 self-titled album from the Spinners.

The Spinners
1973

What a great choice.

My music library is woefully underrepresented with Motown. I have no real excuse for this. I love the music. I guess I just never felt any urgency to own any of it. Growing up in a white middle class suburb of Baltimore probably didn't help. I definitely grew up with the idea that the music that appeared on Soul Train was not meant for me. (And to be fair, it wasn't! But that is no excuse for not appreciating it.) This was not a conscious thought but just sort of an acceptance of my place in the world. I suspect there were many factors that finally got me to snap out of this mindset and see beyond the limits of my experience, at least musically, but certainly falling in love with a woman how loved soul, R&B, and rap played a big part. Thanks for that, Kath. Not everyone can be so lucky.

So back to this album. The Spinners brought their A game for this release and it features a number of well known tracks. However, this does not violate my policy of reviewing stuff I am unfamiliar with since I would never have been able to tell you the tracks were the work of The Spinners. I'll Be Around is almost certainly the biggest and it is just a great song. Rich, catchy, smooth, with a touch of melancholy, it hits everything you want in a soul track. I am also struck by how the track, and this album in general, is straddling the line between the 60s Motown sound and the disco wave to come. The album is produced to a glimmering shine of smoothness with lush orchestration and backing vocals. Not a note is out of place. I think we are starting to see the rise of the producer and the studio sound where music became a bit more sanitized, a bit more perfect. It seems to me that popular music goes in these waves between clean and gritty, each new wave a backlash against the one that came before. I am probably just fitting a curve to data in a completely unsupported fashion but could grunge ever have emerged if not for the über cleaniness of 80s synth pop?

But I digress. I dug this album a lot and am still listening to it. Let me just also note that The Spinners had the chops live too. Are there some cliches and simplistic lyrics here? Of course. (Two different songs reference counting sheep!) Do we hit some predictable thematic tropes? Absolutely. Is there anything wrong with that? Not really. If you can't just groove along and enjoy the ride, maybe you are taking this music thing too seriously. Lord knows I did for far too many years.

No way in hell could I pull off one of those blue suits though.

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