Sade: Classic or Dud?

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?).

i'm old enough to have bought sade's first two singles when they came out, and she was def hyped/supported by certain kinds of hipsters, as stevie t sez - soul boy socialists associated with the face and the nme, in the main - tho of course there were other 'rockist' hipsters who dismissed her, and - another kind of hipster - old skool soul fans who thought she couldn't hold a candle to aretha or whoever.

i guess my point is, 'hipster' wasn't/isn't just one thing/type and is practically useless as a critical 'concept'

Also in fairness by 1993 or so, EVERYTHING from the 90s that wasn't hip-hop, acid house and some indie seemed incredibly unfashionable and remained so for most of the 90s.

Didn't follow this very closely at the time but instinctively I would think that 'Love Deluxe' was the seed for the subsequent critical re-framing

If this is any indication of Sade's critical stock: at some point in the 90s, Q did an extended feature which named the worst album of each year. Diamond Life was their choice for 1984. (And Cockney Rebel's marvellous The Psychomodo was their choice for 1974, pah.)

Let me guess, Metal Machine Music featured prominently?

If that mag is the reason I can always find a used copy of diamond life lp for two bucks more power to them

being boffed by robert elms really is the dark unutterable at the heart of all sade enjoyment that can never be fully overcome

and i say that as a fellow ranger

lol yeah its like i can never read an article by marina hyde wout thinking ewww piers morgan

In terms of critical context here my reference points were probably the 90's looking back on the '80s. I was barely walking when Sade appeared in the mid-80s, so I wasn't really aware of what critics thought of the band at the time (except for Christgau, who seems to have been a dissenting voice). Part of the reason I've never fully embraced Sade's music may have been its surface affinities with "smooth jazz" dreck, although since I adore Steely Dan I understand the value of fine distinctions here. But Steely Dan also has lyrics.

I'm American, by the way, and I read very little UK pop journalism until sometime in the '00s, so I wouldn't have been aware of the general UK critical opinion on Sade in the 90s.

In regards to "UK critical consensus has a much more rapid turnover" (lex pretend) - one of the reasons I don't go out of my way to read UK pop journalism today is that I really don't like kneejerk turnabouts and flavor-of-the-month hyperbole, both tendencies that I associate (perhaps unfairly) with UK rock-crits. To be fair, though, I've pretty much passed on Rolling Stone's review section for years, too - Jann Wenner's starfuckery (try to imagine a two-star review for U2, or the Rolling Stones, or even, say, Coldplay, or conversely a four and a half/five star review for a new/unknown artist) does a real disservice to the many good writers they employ.

And to any UK rock writers on the board here, a disclaimer - I should've written "probably unfairly". I'm talking about a writing style here more than anything else, so take my uninformed generalization for what it is.

If this is any indication of Sade's critical stock: at some point in the 90s, Q did an extended feature which named the worst album of each year. Diamond Life was their choice for 1984.

interesting. i stuck up for sade's critical rep, cuz i never got any clear sense that US critics hated her. most of her albums seemed generally well-reviewed, at least by the most visible mainstream critics. maybe i'm remembering this incorrectly? it's been a while.

the reason i described sade-hate in terms of (always tediously divisive) "hipsters" was that...
A) the wufs used that term in initially asking about sade's supposed critical rehabilitation, and...
B) i observed a lot of smooth music hate among trendy indie/anticorporate/punk types during the 80s and 90s.

seems to me that this was the dominant form US hipster/scenesterism took during that era, and the attitude was certainly prevalent among "edgier", low-circulation zine & magazine critics. but hipsters of this sort are hardly representative of pop criticism as a whole, right? even when they publish reviews and essays in your trendier magazines.

suppose this is the same argument put forth by xhuxk, with his constant appeals to P&J in attempt to establish an objective critical baseline (often in opposition to the confusion of trendy points of view with "critical consensus"). tbh, i've found that annoying in the past, but suddenly understand the impulse. not saying that sade's critical rep wasn't in the dumps, just that i never saw much evidence of it. were love deluxe and lovers rock critically savaged or ignored upon release?

Love Deluxe actually ranked #31 in the 1993 Pazz & Jop. So obviously I didn't know what the fuck I was talking about a few posts back.

when lovers rock came out it was pretty huge and acclaimed and tbh when i heard it i finally "got" sade. unfortunately i think a lot of people only knew her from lite fm ads which juxtaposed 'smooth operator' with 'songbird.'

xp And Lovers Rock places at #25 in 2000.

And since I went out and said "hipster" I'm wondering if there's a better or at least less contentious/less played-out term to use. I was questioning it myself because it's so overused, but I think in a place like ILM it's basically understood - not least because many tastemaking ILMers are hipsters themselves. I didn't mean it as a term of derision either - I envy hipsters their temperament and their ability to pick up on new shit and what have you. But whenever I've tried that look on for myself it didn't take. Better to be honestly unhip than a trying-too-hard poseur.

other side of the coin is that, not among critics but among music-inclined friends (many of whom are unregenerate punks, rockers, indies & metalheads), i find that my enthusiasm for sade often raises eyebrows. was so in the 90s and hasn't changed much since.

Actually I love "Smooth Operator." Love Deluxe has some shitty New-Age style drum loops, but "Pearls" is pretty great if you ignore some of the lyrics. Right now mid-80s production kitsch sounds better than early-90s production kitsch. That'll change, though.

I think I am going to have to killfile this "thewufs" person.

Hey, sorry I wasted your time.

wufs, re: "hipsters"

main problem is that the word is unitary, implies that all hipsters are of a stripe when they aren't. hipsters come in endless varieties, and worse, everyone defines and views them differently. you might as well say "those people over there" for all the real specificity the term possesses.

i mean, i know what i mean when i talk about "hipsters" and i'm sure you do too, but if we were to hash out the details, we'd almost certainly find that we weren't talking about the same people in the same way. plus there's so much pejorative baggage, intended or not.

which is fucked. because it's hard to talk about the interaction of art and culture without taking early adopters and other trendsetters into account. you just have to be careful w/it.

Thanks contenderizer. This is a hard thing to really talk about openly and honestly - too easy to generalize and piss people off, I agree. And often they have a right to be pissed off about it, too.

Anyway, avoiding easy generalizations is a hallmark of good (as opposed to half-assed) criticism.

one of the things that makes u realize how truly great Sade is, is when you hear a great Sade song, and you go, man, what are some other artists like THIS, and then you realize there are none

well i guess there's sweetback

Maxwell?

Tracey Thorn comes closest, I think.