His squeal of “Rock me, daddy-o”, incongruously tacked to the end of Dog Eat Dog’s chorus, typifies the showmanship that makes the album a personal spotlight for the singer. The album’s three singles – the title track, Dog Eat Dog and Antmusic – are also its best songs, deliciously combining dual-drummer rhythms that sounded like nothing else in pop. What they got was theatrical, raucous and unforgettable. Ant worked the image convincingly enough to persuade fans that they weren’t buying a record but an ideology. McLaren came up with the idea of basing the sound on hypnotic, surging Burundi drumbeats, and of dressing the singer as a hybrid pirate/Native American. While scuffling around the fringes of the music business in the late 70s, Goddard had encountered Malcolm McLaren, and the template for the album emerged. It was that rare thing: a groundbreaking album that was also hugely successful (it hit No 1 and spent more than a year in the charts), turning Adam Ant into a pop figurehead. I feel beneath the white there is a redskin suffering from centuries of taming.” Those were the opening lines to the title track of an album that forced the public to accept that a former small-time punk called Stuart Goddard had a unique pop vision. “A new royal family, a wild nobility, we are the family/ A low-riding tour of 70s Harlem, topped off by the title track’s aching ghetto blues. The blaxploitation story is one of those rickety movies with triumphant soundtracks: take Marvin Gaye’s Trouble Man, James Brown’s Black Caesar, or this to-and-fro between jazz composer JJ Johnson and former Sam Cooke protege Bobby Womack. Fearless and fearsomely well crafted, this is one of a handful of albums that booted jazz into the 21st century.
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When Pete Wareham’s band chanced upon their (then) unique fusion of rock power, compositional brains and the vocalised squalling of free jazz, they nearly renamed themselves Last Chance Disco. Powerage is superior, though: it’s lean and spare, and the lyrics are the best of AC/DC’s career – innuendo-free portraits of hardnuts and losers. They lost the boogie, and adopted the 4/4 time that made them stars with Highway to Hell. The fifth AC/DC studio album marked a crucial change. It offered blood-and-fire Rastafarian prophesy detailed via impossibly beguiling vocal harmonies and gorgeous minor-key melodies the coming apocalypse has rarely sounded so sweet. Gangsta rap’s world-conquering popularity could not have happened without this pivotal debut.įew albums exemplify the contradiction at the heart of roots reggae quite like the Abyssinians’ debut (also known as Satta Massagana), which collected the vocal trio’s early 70s singles. Years before Jay-Z and Biggie made the hustler a rap archetype, and while NWA’s noisy, post-Public Enemy aesthetic was defining a new genre, Above the Law showed that gangsterism had a smooth, muscularly musical side. Antonio Hart’s blues-inflected alto sax adds a jazzy edge. This set sometimes has the jostling heat of a street-market, and sometimes the brassy blare of a Latin-jazz or New Orleans marching band. Produced by Trevor Horn, ABC’s debut took the pulse of disco and returned the sensual sweep that post-punk had stripped out of it, framing Martin Fry’s witty meta-narratives in soaring strings and irresistible funk.īeirut-raised oud player and composer Abou-Khalil vivaciously connects western jazz and classical music with Arab culture. Post-punk was great, sure, but not very sexy. And Head Over Heels proved they were still capable of buoyant pop, despite their maudlin mood. Yet the title track (a tale of fear and paranoia, layered with ominous synths and an intelligent disco chorus) was a career high. Her untimely death in 2001 robbed the world of an artist coming into her own.Ībba’s final studio album followed the gritty breakdown of both the band’s marriages, as evidenced on the aching One of Us and the gushing Slipping Through My Fingers. The producers provided the acid bass, fragmented beats and lavish synths, but Aaliyah’s glacial presence made her the undisputed star. The turn of the century was a golden age for R&B, as honey-voiced singers teamed up with cutting-edge producers. They were too far ahead of their time to be successful, but Early compiles the 1978-85 cuts that influenced everyone from former ACR support acts Talking Heads and Madonna to, more recently, LCD Soundsystem and the Rapture.
Named after a Brian Eno lyric, ACR fused jagged Wire guitars and George Clinton beats to create the now commonplace sound of punk-funk.
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