Hayes turned the band’s well-oiled grooves into one of the loveliest singles of the late-disco period, building a plush arrangement of piano, layered harmonies, moody bass, and Byrd’s own effervescent trumpet detailing. The group’s second album, 1981’s Love Byrd, saw them teaming up with producer Isaac Hayes, who offered slick production chops as well as his quartet of backup singers, Hot Buttered Soul Unlimited. By the '80s, Byrd, an accomplished jazz/funk trumpeter who also taught at North Carolina Central University, had moved to Elektra after a long run on Blue Note and formed a new band that included students from his classes. But what makes "Shack Up" a classic is its ultra-sparse atmosphere, making it feel like ACR were stripping something to its core principles, in the process burrowing to the very core of what makes certain styles tick. -Nick NeylandĪrriving after the disco bubble had already popped, Donald Byrd & 125th Street, N.Y.C.’s "Love Has Come Around" is as optimistic as they come.
ACR singer Simon Topping emotes in a gray monotone, similar to Ian Curtis, while drummer Donald Johnson, who had arrived the previous year, brings a funky danceability to the song that Factory would explore even further with the emergence of the Happy Mondays later in the decade. Originally released on the Factory Benelux offshoot partly formed by Ian Curtis’s girlfriend Annik Honoré, "Shack Up" came out in the same year (1980) as Dexys Midnight Runners’ "Geno" and resembles the bloodless flip side to Kevin Rowland’s unwavering passion. On "Shack Up", they landed on a magnetic three-way split between funk, old soul, and the long-raincoat gloom of their hometown labelmates Joy Division. Manchester’s A Certain Ratio followed the post-punk dictum of finding common ground between contrasting styles. Thankfully, though that horror is keenly felt in Zé’s music, he harnesses it with such a manic sense of invention it feels like its own kind of deliverance. -Jazz Monroe From that "inverted orgasm," Christ emerges with dismay into an unjust world. Gleefully lampooning the state’s Catholic orthodoxy, the tortured narrator embodies a foetal Jesus and dramatizes his birth as a gory, first-person womb bust-out.
A spiky, wonderfully avant-garde highlight, Nave Maria ’s title track makes literal Zé’s claim that he’s "a composer of only one piece." The components had already appeared on his 1976 album Estudando O Samba, but the recycled tune–rendered here with a serrated, quasi-metal guitar line–shows Zé’s deep yen to perfect his most madcap compositions, which other artists, were they bright enough to write them, would likely shelve in a moment of unwelcome sanity.Īnyone nonplussed need not translate the lyrics, which are pure dada. Later that decade, David Byrne chanced upon Zé’s music and released a compilation on his Luaka Bop label. It sold like cold cakes, and the 48-year-old, either too broke or heartbroken to continue, made plans to work at his brother’s gas station. Often, the movement’s musical element wed exuberant, traditionally Brazilian sounds with a rock'n'roll pose and jarring descriptions of political violence and social unrest Zé, a firebrand among revolutionaries, was particularly concerned with the folly of "globarbarization." When Tropicália lost the war, Zé sojourned into experimentalism, and in 1984, six years after his previous full-length, he released a revelatory electric opus called Nave Maria. In the late '60s, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil invited Tom Zé to join the Tropicálistas and light a fire under Brazil’s military dictatorship. True to form, he manages to retain a sliver of his egomania even in his darkest hour, claiming his "Egyptian voice will hypnotize." After three decades of being entranced by he of the magnificent bouffant, maybe it's time we concede the point. -Renato Pagnani With "I Cry (Night After Night)", Egyptian Lover not only paved the way for the sad robot music that the likes of Kanye West and Future would go on to push farther and into weirder territory, he also helped establish a trope that rappers still employ to this day: the sad-sack confessional that humanizes their bulletproof tough-guy persona, or in Lover's case, his gift-to-womankind lothario status. Absent is the Egyptian iconography that situated the Californian DJ/producer/rapper/electro pioneer's early-'80s output squarely in the realm of Afrofuturism while also giving it the faintest whiff of novelty in its place is the musical equivalent of crying into your pillow after eating a pint of Ben & Jerry's. "I Cry (Night After Night)" might not be Egyptian Lover's most famous anthem (that would be "Egypt Egypt"), but it remains one of Greg Broussard's most influential.
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