Patti Labelle The Gospel According To Patti Labelle Rare' title='Patti Labelle The Gospel According To Patti Labelle Rare' />The Quiet Storm Pitchfork. Photoillustration by Michael Renaud. Underscore surveys undervalued artists, scenes, and eras of the musical past. Listen to a 1. 04 track Quiet Storm playlist compiled by writer Eric Harvey on Spotify. Jango is about making online music social, fun and simple. Free personal radio that learns from your taste and connects you to others who like what you like. Patti Labelle The Gospel According To Patti Labelle Rare' title='Patti Labelle The Gospel According To Patti Labelle Rare' />By 1. Smokey Robinson was adrift. After setting the standard for Motown during the 1. Miracles, and his first two post Miracles solo albums 1. Smokey and 1. 97. Pure Smokey hadnt performed to his expectations. Meanwhile, Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye zoomed past him to become the labels and to a degree, African American popular musics torchbearers. Gayes 1. 97. 1 suite Whats Going On in particular vexed Robinson. Here was an album rightfully celebrated for its political message that also managed to sound effortlessly smooth. The Covered Up trope as used in popular culture. A specific form of Older Than They Think, in which the Cover Version of a song becomes so iconic that people. Newage, Pop, PopRock, RB, RR, Rock, Vocal MIDI Index I K Song Title Size Performed By Sequencer I Believe Version 1 76kb 8. Frankie Laine, Numerous Others. Even coming out of the tumultuous late 6. Smokeys music. Concepts, though, were another thing. Robinson set out to make his own Whats Going On, but whereas Gaye turned his focus so empathetically outward, Robinson looked inward. The result was 1. A Quiet Storm. Seamlessly updating the style of contemplative romantic soul music hed invented with Youve Really Got a Hold On Me, Ooo Baby Baby, The Tracks of My Tears, and More Love, Storm reasserted Robinson as a soul auteur. Robinson is moved neither by Marvin Gayes macho sensibilities nor by Stevie Wonders semi mystical mental images, and he has more pop expertise than either, wrote Robert Palmer in Rolling Stone. With 1. 8 years of singing, writing, and producing behind him, he naturally passes over both self celebration and prophecy in favor of love and happiness. The album opens like radio theater an impossibly high pitched synth produced whistle our soft warning siren is paired with wind sound effects, which gradually give way to a loping bassline that could have been drawn from countless 6. Motown hits. I finally had the musical concept Id been seeking since hearing Whats Going On, Robinson later said. I saw seven songs carried on the back of a breeze, blowing through the record from start to finish. The nearly eight minute title track establishes the Quiet Storm not as a meteorological phenomenon providing ambience, but as an intangible stimulant flowing through Robinsons body A power source of tender force. In his review, writer Robert Christgau keyed in on the albums most important contribution. Indeed, this is soul music aiming not for the hips, but a deeper metaphysical connection between two intimate lovers. A Quiet Storm plays like a concept album devoted to tranquil monogamy. The album re energized Robinsons flagging career, helped by the fact that it fit well with a lot of black chart music at the time, which was doubling down on the initial break between the spiritual and the carnal that birthed soul music. Roberta Flack her voice dubbed the sound of melting velvet  was a star, and her duets with classically trained Donny Hathaway added a moody influence drawn from his jazz training. Al Green and Minnie Riperton took minimalist bedroom soul mainstream, largely owing to their ownership of their respective upper vocal registers. Me and Mrs. Jones was three years old in 7. Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, were coming off their remarkable peak of bringing lush strings and skittering hi hats to R B, more or less setting the template for disco. Marvin Gaye was in between Lets Get It On and I Want You. The Ohio Players. The Isley Brothers. Isaac Hayes. Barry White. But in pop music, novelty is always more visible than continuity. And in the mid 7. A 44 thump at 1. The one week that Quiet Storms Baby Thats Backatcha spent atop the R B singles chart was preceded for two weeks by R B veteran Joe Simons cheesy disco pander Get Down Get Down Get on the Floor and followed by Kool the Gangs spaced out Jungle Boogie copy Spirit of the Boogie. Backatcha was a 7 disco single flutes and light Latin percussion buoyed the backbeat but it was a Robinson disco single between two songs devoted to the pleasures of getting funky, Smokey turned up the gain on a couples dancefloor conversation. Melvin Lindseys silky, youthful voice and his smooth soul song selections coupled with the Sunday evening slot to create something bigger than he could have imagined The Quiet Storm. In the decades after desegregation and the most publicly visible work of the Civil Rights movement, a black middle class took shape. The black suburban population doubled between 1. While the Reagan administration ensured a glass ceiling loomed overhead, a long deferred entry into the post World War II American Dream felt at least partially realized for many of these families, and black owned businesses flourished in many sectors. For those in the radio and recording industries, however, this was a vastly underserved demographic with newly acquired purchasing power. Clive Davis of CBS Records commissioned a detailed report from the Harvard Business School, which chided the label for what cultural critic Nelson George describes as its historic lack of commitment to black music. The report focused on what it called soul radio, which provided direct access to black consumers, and often served as a stepping stone to placement on Top 4. Its unclear whether Howard Universitys adult contemporary radio station WHUR 9. Washington D. C. area. WHURs FM signal reached farther into D. C. suburbs than the urban centered AM stations did, and the programming style reflected this. As the decade progressed, the stations focus on politics and jazz started changing one DJ claimed that on air personalities were encouraged to sound less black to appeal to middle class suburbanites. When WHUR hired sales manager Cathy Hughes, however, this approach would be quantified to perfection, and the station would rocket past its competition. Mbox Driver Software here. Hughes was an acolyte of the move toward increasingly market tested niche programming, specifically a trend called psychographics. Different from demographics, which focus on data like age, race, and address, psychographics aim to quantify otherwise intangible qualities like attitudes and values. Hughes decided that her upwardly mobile, single, black female friends were an untargeted market, and a radio format appealing to them would set WHUR apart from its competition. One Sunday night in May 1. Hughes idea would accidentally come to fruition. Needing a last minute substitute DJ for the evening, she brought in Melvin Lindsey, a Howard journalism student, WHUR intern, and her babysitter, to boot. Lindsey grabbed some Isley Brothers, Delfonics, and Spinners LPs from his familys collection and hurried to the studio. Somehow, despite Lindseys complete lack of experience behind the mic, it clicked. Lindseys silky, youthful voice was an appealing shift from many of the more forceful black DJs of the day, and his smooth soul song selections coupled with the Sunday evening slot to create something bigger than he or Hughes could have imagined The lines were flooded with calls. There must have been some kind of natural knack. The next morning, Hughes came up with the perfect name for Lindsey, and his show The Quiet Storm. Lindsey left the station to finish his bachelors degree, but upon returning in November 1. The Quiet Storm quickly became a WHUR weeknight staple, and Lindsey became a local celebrity.