Sade: Classic or Dud?

rev 100% otm

but that said theres no excuse for not having all of them imho

rev 100% otm

― lebroner (D-40), vrijdag 27 mei 2011 1:48 (18 minutes ago) Bookmark

There is a lovely Kenny Larkin remix of Give It Up you can find on the Sade remixes collection. It's great. 11 minutes. I just start it over when it's done. Usually don't stop listening until it's time to leave the apt or whatever. Hoping for a gig soon where I can drop it.

Larkin was probably the best Detroit techno artist to do a straight beefing up of the song (as opposed to a Carl Craig style remix that would just use the original track as inspiration or a jumping off point). I mean it's basically just an extended DJ tool version of the song. Not much added. Larkin always sounds so fragile and fussy to me... he sort of fills an archetypal emotional / spacey / gentle Detroit sound for me. Like Craig's More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art. I guess Craig did it first as Psyche/BFC.

Larkin has his own niche though. I think it's the gratuitous flanging. Give It Up's percussion basically sounds like something Larkin would have arranged minus a kick drum and slower.

Eh, I'm talking out of my ass. Give It Up (Kenny Larkin remix) is just so perfect that it sounds like has to be part of some bigger order of Detroit music...

Okay here it is. On one condition: don't listen unless you can play it loud, with bass.

http://www.mediafire.com/?7f23fissujwspnz

I hope that's kosher

the rabbi says a ok

I mean linking... I am serious about my volume diktat

alfred you should get all of the first three records. work backwards into them, back in time. you can find most of 'em super cheap, check amazon used marketplace or something.

I played some sade for some of my students and they wanted to know who it was and they wrote it down in their iphones so they would remember to look for it later

That house mix of "Give It Up" is A++++ btw

what were u up to w/ ur student that u thought sade was an appropriate soundtrack dayo

that kenny larkin remix is excellent

we were playing cards and they wanted something 'light'! I put on steely dan later but it didn't go over as well xp

thanks for the Kenny Larkin, could dance to that indefinitely

the live DVDs are very nice. smoke some herb, watch it with your lady. the bomb.

― pipecock, Wednesday, March 12, 2008 12:26 PM (3 years ago)

smoke weed listen to sade!!!! pipe otfm here

gonna see here at the prudental center on the 25th and do jsut that

is pipecock a swizz beatz sock ?

for bimble wherever you are

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpwKdzOcurI

yeah, this thin lizzy cover is kinda the shit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bW8HHw8kpfM

Sade covering thin lizzy could only be a more deej look if it featured a jacka guest rap and dj quik remix

Love this song.

What's up with the hipster vogue for Sade these days? I mean, I like Sade somewhat, but I always thought it was basically fuck/dinner-music for yuppies. Like my parents love Sade, for instance. Then all of a sudden a year and a half ago or so my best friend - who's so effortlessly cool it's infuriating - was talking about how Sade is awesome. And I was like, OK, sure, but I didn't quite get where the love was coming from. Is it the (outmoded genre label alert!) trip-hop connection or something?

an unprecedented rise in the number of chill bros

I always thought it was basically fuck/dinner-music for yuppies

You shouldn't feel so alone -- thousands of people aver this cliché.

Oh yeah, I know that - in fact, it seemed like the critical consensus/cliche regarding Sade for years. I'm just wondering what instigated the critical reevaluation, and why it came from the cool people. (in other words, non-"bros", heheh.)

ha i had no idea "still in love with you" was a cover. all three new tracks on the ultimate collection are superb imo.

i don't know how much of a critical consensus it was really, sade's always been revered in dance/hip-hop/r&b/soul circles.

Oh yeah, I know that - in fact, it seemed like the critical consensus/cliche regarding Sade for years. I'm just wondering what instigated the critical reevaluation, and why it came from the cool people. (in other words, non-"bros", heheh.)

Umm everybody I know who thinks about Sade at all has considered her a great artist since at least stronger than pride, when it was new. I don't think any critical reevaluation has taken place, you just found out that people think she is great.

At precisely what hour of what day in what year did _Appetite for Destruction_ become a hip cultural reference point?

Same answer: "The day people found out about it"

Oh yeah, I know that - in fact, it seemed like the critical consensus/cliche regarding Sade for years. I'm just wondering what instigated the critical reevaluation, and why it came from the cool people. (in other words, non-"bros", heheh.)

― thewufs, Wednesday, June 15, 2011 9:24 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

i don't think what you're describing had anything to do with critical consensus. it's just that dumb 80s & 90s hipsters made an ethos of sneering at anything too smooth, soft or "mainstream." now that it no longer seems cool to do so, hipsters have come around.

I suspect Sade's critical stocks have more to do with whether there's been a new album recently.

Probably the various critical rehabilitations of smooth music (yacht rock et al) would have had a knock-on effect in some circles, esp for people who weren't really around for previous albums. A 21 yr old today would have been 10 when Lovers Rock came out!

:o

god thanks for putting that into perspective - I still consider LR as a recent album

my haircutter, a gorgeous 19-year-old who was born in jamaica and lives in london and who looks a lot like sade, has never heard of her

Also I don't even remember Lover's Rock making a dent on the radio, whereas I definitely remember Love Deluxe tunes - so it wouldn't surprise me that a lot of people who started paying attention to music in the past 15 years or so might not have been particularly aware of Sade.

c.f. say Janet Jackson whose career only started flying under the radar in about the mid-00s.

In my part of town "By Your Side" got airplay after the fact -- after "Sex and the City" played the hell out of it in 2001 or 2002.

tim f otm

Steely Dan: "Steely Dan's name has been popping up as a hip musical crush. Remember, this glossy bop-pop was the indifferent aristocracy to punk rock's stone-throwing in the late 70's. People fought

same argument seems to get advanced against hall and oates too

Yeah Sade fits well into the nu-Balearic thing, but that's obviously not a big enough factor to fuel a revival like this in its entirety.

Just being a safe distance for the 80s probably helps - Lex's Guardian piece pointed out that she's associated so heavily with aspirational lifestyles and it's unsurprising that would've been critical kryptonite among left-leaning critics in the 80s, especially in Britain.

Well I don't think the big sales are due to what's big with critics, but how Sade is presented by critics can be influenced by changing attitudes to "smooth" music, which is much broader than just nu-balearic.

Your additional point is a part of this Matt - the rehabilitation of smooth music is in part due to distance from the aspirational 80s.

that piece was for the national!

big US/UK divide here too, needless to say, and i get the impression that UK critical consensus has a much more rapid turnover - ie few young UK critics right now would give a shit that sade was antithetical to all that 80s UK critics held dear

In terms of wider consensus I don't think it's actually about what people thought in the 80s so much as what people thought about the 80s in the 90s.

Also Lex you may be a maverick but I suspect most general community taste setters are rather older than you!

Not necessarily musically antithetical but atithetical through reflected politics, but that doesn't really hold now obviously.

I mean my guess would be that Sade would have been lumped in with people like Phil Collins and Simply Red regardless of whether or not she deserved it whereas by the 90s it was perfectly acceptable to have a Shara Nelson or Gabrielle here or there. She came through on the wrong side of the Wild Bunch watershed I think.

Sade had loads of critical support at the start of her career, though. She was well-connected, and she slotted right into that whole "soul-cialism" ethos. (Case in point: "When Am I Going To Make A Living" off the first album.) A quick check reveals that Diamond Life was #2 in The Face's year-end poll, #10 in Melody Maker and #40 in the NME. But then it got played to death for the next five years in crap wine bars (Diamond Life was the Moon Safari of its day, basically) - so people just got fed up with her!

So basically her career trajectory is closer to UB40?

xpost
Some bizarre back-projection onto 80s critics taste here I think - Sade was Bobby Elms' gf and poster girl for the early Face, most of whose writers were firmly proto RedWedgistas. Working Week's "Venceremos" kind of sums up the political/style temper of the times.

Agreed. Hell, even Simply Red had their moment, Valentine Brothers cover and all.

xpost Heh - well, she never had a "sod it, I'll just bung out a bunch of covers" moment, so fair play to her!

She continued to get respect from the London soulboy/KISS FM crew, though - the consensus being "she can be a bit boring, but the band are hot".

Well obviously I wasn't there at a time, or at least not in a position to be paying much attention, but at the time I started she seemed hugely unfashionable, part of that might have been her career being boiled down to Smooth Operator and not much else.

it was only in the mid 00s, after i got online, that i realised sade had any critical respect at all, so pernicious was the "oh she's BORING YUPPIE MUSIC" line in uk criticism

^^^ yeah I really think this is some 90s shit.

Matt's "she was on the wrong side of the Wild Bunch" might be correct if offending critics had actually listened to Love Deluxe... or had been prepared to give anyone other than Massive Attack a standing get out of jail free card for smoothness (see also, um, Bedtime Stories?).