I’m assuming it’s no accident that this gorgeous retro-soul track from R. Kelly was leaked on the anniversary of Aaliyah’s death. Beautiful.
Download here.
Update: And now, the video (H/T Maura). It’s a retro-soul explosion.
JBs and Funkadelic guitarist, and brother of Bootsy.
The widow of Charlie Rich, Margaret Ann, passed away last week. Anyone who has read Peter Guralnick’s pieces on Rich in Feel Like Going Home and Lost Highway knows what an amazing person she was (and if you haven’t read them, you should). Great songwriter, too:
As much as I love Big Star and a lot of his solo material (not to mention the Box Tops, who many of his fans tend to write off), I have never been an Alex Chilton cultist. Partly because he was too eccentric to ever be consistent, but also because too much of his audience accepted his eccentricity as his genius. He was the ultimate insider who became an outsider, a sixteen-year-old who went to number one on his first record, and then intentionally walked, or stumbled, as far away from fame as possible, leaving a handful of brilliant albums and tracks in his wake. But for me his cult too often epitomized everything I disliked about the alternative and indie scenes; the idolization of anything wide and outside; the tendency to take intention for achievement; the misguided belief in mental illness as a wormhole to satori. None of that is Chilton’s fault, of course, and I may be missing something I shouldn’t, but it also may explain why one of my favorite Chilton tracks is “Dalai Lama”, in which he dryly skewers mindless adoration and belief, even while possibly indulging in a bit of it himself. Whatever the case, I’m sorry to see him go so young.
Billy Lee Riley, RIP