Revisiting two records that we didn’t spend enough time with in 2008.

Every arts writer is implored, to one degree or other, to write year-end lists. But for music fans (not just writers), the impulse is especially pronounced—many of us learned about pop via the Top 40. And many like to quantifying our tastes in lists. If we’re occasionally mocked for our trouble (cf. High Fidelity), so be it.

Nevertheless, list glut has been with us for years now. December brings forth hundreds of year-end lists in every category, and probably none more than music. I’m adding to the glut by supervising Idolator’s Top 80, and voting in a few other polls.

But whether fan or professional, and whatever “keeping up” means when the oft-cited figure of 30,000 albums released per year seems a severe underestimate, it can be tough not to feel a little year-end guilt. This isn’t a complaint, even if it can sound like one: too much music, not enough time. Wahhh, right? But as someone who writes about it for a living, I do take some pride in getting my lists right every year—I want them to reflect what moved me, not some phantom idea of what the consensus might end up being.

The guilt lies in not latching harder onto things you knew you liked but never went back to. The selfish explanation comes from wanting the privilege of more good music in my life; it pains me a little when I realize I’ve been ignoring something I flipped for the first time through. Sometimes I’m busy with other listening; sometimes I put a CD somewhere I never look for six months. So I’m glad to have a couple records I hadn’t quite finished with back in rotation.

Drive-By Truckers’ Brighter Than Creation’s Dark hasn’t made a lot of year-end lists, one reason Robert Christgau was talking about it on Slate last week. (It was Christgau’s No. 3 album of the year.) I’d bought and played it the day it was released, and was immediately impressed—19 cuts, 79 minutes, songs programmed to heighten tonal contrasts, most of them terrific. The three songwriters—band founders Mike Cooley and Patterson Hood, as well as recently added bassist Shonna Tucker—are clearly on their game, and a few songs (the snarling “That Man I Shot,” the broken “Daddy Needs a Drink”) are as powerful as I’ve heard this year.

Naturally, I didn’t play it again for nine months. Maybe its particular workingman’s blues was too much to take; I kept thinking to play it and then changing my mind. It’s good to hear again—if harrowing now, in the Wall Street collapse’s aftermath. Maybe that’s why I hadn’t gone back: so many of my colleagues have lost their jobs this year that listening to it may have felt too close to home.

An album that goes down a lot smoother is Andy Stott’s Unknown Exception: Selected Tracks Vol. 1 (2004-2008), which re-entered my path, I’m embarrassed to admit, via a poll I voted in: it placed tenth in techno webmag Resident Advisor’s compilations poll. It’s very simple stuff: a British dance producer making warm, pliant, endlessly playable dub techno that’s so easy on the ears you can start to take it for granted.

That’s what I did until I saw the RA poll. Not because I’d put it to the side and forgotten its existence, but because I hadn’t even considered how much I liked it, even though I’d played it a number of times. The reason was practical: it was a CD that I’d go to whenever I wanted a break from what I was playing for work, and just wanted to hear some music. Sometimes it takes another person (or group of people) to validate something you already like—to make you realize how much you like it. It’s on my list now, and rising.

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Hip-hop beat-makers Jake One and DJ Signify offer differing takes on the showcase album

Hip-hop albums by producers who don’t rap–unlike, say, Kanye West or Swizz Beatz, who started as beatmakers before taking to the mike–often fall into two broad categories: The first is to showcase the producer’s sonic and beat-making range–not to mention his Rolodex. (Think of Marley Marl’s In Control or DJ Muggs’ Soul Assassins; both featured many, many guest MCs and felt as much like compilations as albums.) The other is the mostly-instrumental mood piece. (DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing and RJD2’s Deadringer come to mind here.)

New offerings from Seattle’s Jake One and Brooklyn’s DJ Signify illustrate the dichotomy perfectly.

Based solely on their cities’ reps, you might guess that Jake One would be behind the instrumental disc, whereas Signify would be responsible for the posse-cut one. After all, the Emerald City is known to be dominated by music from independent labels; fans of some of these imprints are responsible for a thriving instrumental hip-hop scene. NYC, on the other hand, is still rap’s densest stronghold for MCs. But, in fact, it’s Jake One’s White Van Music that’s the rhymers’ showcase as much as the producer’s; Signify’s Of Cities (out January 20), meanwhile, evokes an abandoned metropolis in the dead of night.

Jake One’s (born Jake Dutton) C.V. reveals him as a precise fit for a project so deliberately all-over-the-place. He’s contributed tracks to albums ranging from De La Soul’s mature The Grind Date to Beg for Mercy by latter-day gangstas G-Unit’s; he’s lent beats to genial everyman Lyrics Born’s Everywhere at Once as well as Curtis from the richer-than-thou 50 Cent. On White Van Music Jake One shows off his rap knowledge on a couple of songs that offer smart MC pairings: “The Truth” (video below) features Philly’s Freeway and Minneapolis’s Brother Ali, who rhyme with a complementary urgency; “Oh Really” teams up two sardonic realists from different eras: De La Soul’s Posdnuos and Atmosphere’s Slug.

Click here to view the embedded video.

DJ Signify’s album features only one guest vocalist: Brooklyn MC Aesop Rock appears on two cuts. The rest is, with some help here and there–notably from guitarist/keyboardist Matt Kelly—all production work: samples, programming, beats. The mind-movies Signify evokes may not have much plot, but they more than make up for it in sheer atmosphere. “Costume Kids”– a James Bond theme from hell–features a nifty little sitar riff, overmodulated electric bass, and distant, billowing snatches of high-pitched melody. “Vanessa” begins like slowed-down shoegaze before segueing into slow-mo chase music; “1993” filters cop-flick horns till they sound watery and dreamy.

A dozen years ago, Of Cities would have been filed as “trip-hop”–its atmosphere is musty and bass-heavy, the drums are filtered to tickle the headphone ear more than move bodies through big speakers. And like the best of that oh-so-’90s genre, the album is detailed enough to make your snuggled ears happy.

New Order and Jay Reatard release singles compilations that challenge the hallowed album form

Albums were once simply collections of previously released songs. Therefore, there shouldn’t be too great a split between an album and a singles roundup, right?

For whatever reason–reading too many issues of Rolling Stone, let’s say–I always make a distinction in my head, if not with my ears: Albums should be structured like a long drive—peaks, valleys, highway, side roads, etc., a cohesive variety; singles compilations are more like a strung-together series of events. Of course, those rules aren’t hard and fast— exceptions start at albums that birth loads of singles, such as Thriller and Rumours.

It’s impossible, however, to imagine much of the best music released since the ’60s without this distinction. Would the Rolling Stones have even recorded “Country Honk,” a shambling acoustic run-through of the classic “Honky Tonk Women,” if they hadn’t decided to leave their version of the latter off Let It Bleed? Would Let It Bleed have so precise a shape minus “Country Honk?”

Rhino Records recently reissued deluxe editions of five albums recorded by the Manchester band New Order during the 1980s. Each is packaged in a slipcase with a bonus CD containing both sides of the singles each record spawned. The rereleases of 1981’s Movement and 1983’s Power, Corruption & Lies are particularly fascinating: In each pair, the attached singles compilations are the more compelling listens, despite lacking some of the classic album shape and containing multiple mixes of certain songs.

Take the case of Movement, which the band made in the long shadow of Ian Curtis, as it mutated from Joy Division to New Order after the singer’s 1980 suicide. Even today, it sounds enormously tentative: a group taking baby steps toward a new but uncertain identity. Its bonus disc, however, is riveting: New Order grows, takes shape, and fills out on classic singles like “Ceremony,” “Everything’s Gone Green,” and “Temptation.” Even those tracks’ less memorable B-sides sound confident enough to make the collection flow as if it were an album. Power, Corruption & Lies, on the other hand, is a lot less shaky. It’s thin enough, however, to pale in comparison to its attached singles comp, which features variations on three more great 12-inches: “Confusion,” “Thieves Like Us,” and “Blue Monday” (video below).

Click here to view the embedded video.

Four of the longer tracks appear on ’08. It seems appropriate: As you get older, you relax a bit (even if, like Reatard, you’re only 28). The earlier collection is comparatively supercharged and scrappy: 06-07 opens with “Night of Broken Glass,” one of the most genuinely reckless-sounding records in recent memory. Elsewhere, the abrupt sing-along “Feeling Blank Again” recalls early Devo in its angularity and Richard Hell in its cross-generational angst. That’s not to imply ’08 is sedate: “An Ugly Death” rides a speed-strummed acoustic guitar and features wheezing organ, which underscores its can’t-miss chorus (“For you! For me! For alllllll to see!”). Similar ingredients go into “D.O.A.,” which also includes a martial snare beat similar to that of the Supremes’ “Love Is Like an Itching in My Heart.”

Both releases, befitting their origins, maintain a brisk pace even when the tempos wind down–and, because they’re not shaped like albums, they tend to sound equally good on shuffle. That isn’t quite true of the early New Order bonus discs, where the progression is key. But Reatard isn’t about progress. He’s about the now—just as a good singles artists should be.

New photo books on early punks say at least a thousand words

Two of the year’s most enticing photo books tackle rock pioneers as their subjects. In a strange, coincidental twist, both have bright pink covers.

New York Dolls (Abrams Image) collects photographer Bob Gruen’s portraits, live shots, and publicity stills of the mid-’70s pre-punk pacesetters; The Clash (Grand Central), on the other hand, is an oral history— accompanied by a scrumptious array of visuals–of the most widely beloved of the early British punks. The commonality between the books is that their subjects believed that the being in a band was about making spectacles of themselves. (Maybe that’s where the hot pink comes in.) Even if the Dolls and the Clash had not influenced countless acts, they’d have made rock history for their fashion sense alone.

Thanks to the notorious cross-dressing photo on their 1973 debut’s cover (pictured left), the Dolls were infamous before anyone outside New York had heard a note of their music. The shot was misleading, but not by much: The band only played one show, at the drag spot Club 82, while dressed entirely in women’s clothes. Flip through New York Dolls and you’ll see all manner of gender-line-crossing attire. There’s hulking, six-foot bassist Arthur Kane in gold-lamé tube top and hot pants; lead singer David Johansen in a nylon see-through blouse; lead guitarist Johnny Thunders rocking a black feather boa where a shirt should be; and a group shot of them wearing heels so chunky, they make Fluevogs look like matchsticks. Even a spread of the band dressed in ’30s pinstripe gangster regalia looks like a parody of masculinity, thanks to Johansen’s painted-on mustache and Kane’s sloppy, three-shades-too-dark lips sourly puckering a cigarette.

The Malcolm McLaren/Vivienne Westwood red patent leather outfits the group wore onstage in 1975 (while McLaren managed them) were relatively dowdy when compared to the Doll’s found-clothing style. The band’s genius for the spectacularly thrown-together was key to its appearance and its sound as well. The Dolls’ name came from the New York Doll Factory, a toy repair shop; it is appropriate for a band whose music and look both could have come from the Island of Misfit Toys.

The Clash (the band), in contrast, was a lot more severe, both sonically and stylistically. The Clash (the book)—credited to the band’s members, Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon, and Topper Headon—seems more monumental than New York Dolls, partly because of its sheer size. It’s a doorstop for the coffee table (a la The Beatles Anthology) packed with reprinted pages from British pop papers, record sleeves, fanzines, handwritten lyrics, and ephemera galore along with the wealth of photos. Gruen’s compendium, in contrast, is half as tall and far less thick. Yet, what it gives up in stature, Dolls makes up in freshness, which is likely due to the group’s relative lack of exposure when compared with the Clash, one of the most widely photographed bands of its era. (In fact, Gruen already published a 2004 book on them.)

The boys of the Clash were natural camera hogs, though they brooded where the Dolls would pout. They were always in costume. One can grasp the band’s career arc just from this book’s photos; no knowledge of its music is necessary. The looks mutate from early, eye-catching industrial outfits stenciled with slogans, like “heavy duty discipline,” and images of police at the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival riots, into a more classicist, rockabilly style of open collars, high-waist peg-leg trousers, and pompadours (around the time of 1979’s London Calling).

Just as you can see the hunger and fury that drove the band early on, and the ease with multiple styles marking their glorious middle, an uneasy image of Strummer and Jones tells the tale of the Clash’s disintegration after 1982’s Combat Rock. The obvious tension between the two comes out not just in the difference between Jones’ wary gaze and Strummer’s intent stare, but the juxtaposition of the former’s Panama hat and cargo pants with the latter’s leather jacket and a ukulele held like a casual weapon. Both are severe in their own way; neither is ready to cede his ground. If their band hadn’t been called the Clash, one look at this photo tells you it would have been apt.

(Photo of The Clash: © UrbanImage.tv/Adrian Boot)

How Beyoncé’s younger sis may sidestep the trappings of success

I wrote all those words last week discussing “A Milli” as a pop meme, and I missed the most obvious example to date: “Diva,” from Beyoncé’s new I Am … Sasha Fierce. The track is not just inspired by Lil’ Wayne’s hit; it’s a shameless rewrite—and not a very convincing one at that. “A diva is a female version of a hustler,” Beyoncé sings over concrete-mixer bass. But she doesn’t sound like she’s buys the claim (so why should we?). Instead she sounds trapped by her own success, uncertain where to turn next.

That isn’t a problem for her younger sister, Solange. Five years ago, Solange released Solo Star, the kind of R&B album that creates no expectations for a follow-up. But following her work on “Upgrade U” and “Get Me Bodied,” two highlights from Beyoncé’s 2006 album, B’Day, a buzz began to gather for a sophomore effort. Released in late August, Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams is as appealingly unvarnished and full of surprises as her debut was not.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Far less surprising is that Cee-Lo, the vocal half of Gnarls Barkley, co-wrote two of the album’s strongest cuts: “Sandcastle Disco” and “T.O.N.Y.” Sol-Angel is kin to Gnarls’ two albums: R&B at its base, it style-hops freely, as promiscuously as it feels like; its lyrics are as angst-ridden and matter-of-fact as you’d find on an indie-rock album. (That straightforwardness goes for the singing, as well: Solange doesn’t attempt her older sister’s diva stylings, preferring to sound more impetuous and spontaneous.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

If this album turns into the kind of sleeper hit, Solange may end up trapped by her success–feeling as if she has to be ever-quirkier every time out–as surely Beyoncé has by hers. For now, however, it’s a triumph worth basking in.

Reimagining Lil Wayne’s “A Milli” and M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes”

When does a song become a standard? Answer: when a lot of people put their spin on it.

Jazz critic Will Friedwald, whose 2002 book Stardust Melodies features “biographies” of a dozen such songs (“Stardust,” “I Got Rhythm,” “St. Louis Blues”), notes that, “These songs endure from one generation to the next because they are continually recreated and re-imagined for every new era.”

I’ve come to regard a subset of standards as “post-standards.” These are songs that don’t just earn covers but, via sampling and remixes, become sonic (not just melodic or lyrical) building blocks. “Apache” is a perfect example of a post-standard. Versions by the Shadows and Jorgen Ingmann hit No. 1 in the early ’60s, making it de rigueur for surf bands to perform. The 1973 rendition by the Incredible Bongo Band was DJ Kool Herc’s secret weapon when he spun at house parties in the South Bronx, and became hip-hop’s national anthem.

Two songs from this year seem like candidates to become post-standards: New Orleans rapper Lil Wayne’s “A Milli” and London MC/singer M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes.” Both were Top 10 hits, and both garnered the MP3 age’s sincerest form of flattery: a truckload of remixes and freestyles by singers and rappers alike who race to put their voices over the original track.

This is appropriate; both artists owe plenty of their current popularity to the internet. M.I.A. was more famous on message boards than among radio listeners until the inclusion of “Planes” in the trailer for the hit summer movie Pineapple Express put it on the charts. Meanwhile Wayne, a longtime hit maker, built anticipation for Tha Carter III—the album on which “A Milli” appears—with a slew of MP3-only leaks.

Both songs are natural templates for new rhymes: the heavy, Bangladesh-produced “A Milli” bears a concrete-wobbling beat and bass line, whereas the brightly-hued “Planes” is built by producer Diplo on a guitar sample from the Clash’s “Straight to Hell.” In “A Milli”’s case, the reinterpretations range from Americans Meek Mill, Gillie da Kid, Bump J, and Peedi Crakk to London grime MC Tinchy Stryder, to Frenchman CraiZ, whose rambunctious version is predictably titled “Le Million.” There’s also R&B singer-songwriter Shae Fiol, who wrote a new, acoustic guitar-driven song atop Wayne’s track. It’s not a very good one–the song sounds unfinished—but it suggests intriguing and diverse possibilities for future uses of the song.

“Paper Planes,” meanwhile, has attracted a number of new rappers, ranging from Minneapolis up-and-comers Muja Messiah and M.anifest to bigger names like Bun B and Rich Boy, who released an official remix late last year. Most entertaining may be R&B singer Trey Songz’s take. He rewrites the song’s lyrics, transforming the message from a quasi-revolutionary statement of intent (“Third-world democracy/I’ve got more records than the K.G.B.”) to an endorsement of the good life: “First-world hypocrisy/Drinkin’ more liquor than the ABC,” he says. (“I’m just tryin’ to say something like shorty said,” he laughingly adds.)

The best remixes, however, tweak the tracks’ most recognizable elements into new shapes. It’s here that “A Milli” has the advantage. Most remixes of “Paper Planes” that I’ve heard sound clumsy, from Calculons’ drum & bass tweak and Lapse’s choppy house mix to an unexpectedly half-assed version by the DFA, which sounds like an April Fool’s joke. (An exception is a reggae-tinged turn by Beastie Boys’ Adrock, which like the DFA mix is an official release.)

“A Milli,” on the other hand, not only received an expert reshaping by Londoners Chewy Chocolate Cookies, who twist Wayne’s track into what sounds like a Galaga game, but by Warp Records electronic artist Flying Lotus, whose Los Angeles is one of 2008’s most head-spinning albums. The latter’s “Robo Tussin” mix replaces Wayne’s original track with a mélange of sped-up jazz keyboards and cartoon effects that underlines the rapper’s stream-of-consciousness lyrics, as well as Bangladesh’s system-wrecking low end.

The track exemplifies the essence of a post-standard: the ability to shift shape while remaining itself.

Remembering a great man’s always-attentive ears

There’s something cosmically appropriate about Studs Terkel dying, at age 96, on Halloween. It shares a similarity with James Brown dying on Christmas Day: the holiday adds a notable flourish. The Godfather of Soul lit up the stage like a Christmas tree, and Terkel’s finest work came from walking in someone else’s shoes. Few writers have the latter’s degree of empathy, as an interviewer or as a scribe. He was unquestionably America’s greatest oral historian. As his fellow Chicagoan Roger Ebert put it earlier this year, “One reason Terkel gets people to talk so openly with him is that he’s not an academic or a cross-examiner. He comes across as this guy sitting down with you to have a good, long talk.”

Terkel had good, long talks with a wide swath of people; he was, however, especially good at drawing out musicians. It helped that he adored music. In 1945, already a radio writer, actor, and sports announcer, he got his own Sunday-night program on Chicago’s ABC-affiliate. According to his 2007 memoir, Touch and Go, he wanted to play records, “Not just jazz, but all kinds.” The first installment of his show, The Wax Museum, featured Brazilian composer Hector Villa-Lobos, folk singer Burl Ives, jazz legend Louis Armstrong, and German opera soprano Lotte Lehmann. The operatic selections received commentary from local character Long Shot Sylvester–“a horseplayer, a tout, who happened to love opera,” Terkel wrote. “He’d tell the story in his own lingo.” (An example: “Carmen was about a tomato who loved not too wisely but too often. … And the moral is: better a live, cold potato than a dead, hot tomato.”)

Terkel’s second book–1967’s Division Street: America, interviews with the haves and have-nots along the Windy City thoroughfare–broke him outside Chicago. His first book, published a decade before, is a collection of 13 interviews simply titled Giants of Jazz, featuring conversations that peeled the curtain back on legends like Armstrong, Coltrane, Ellington, Holliday, and more. The New Press republished Giants of Jazz in 2006. The same publisher released a new Terkel collection, And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey, the year prior. (I have seldom experienced as hard a pang of professional jealousy as when a friend told me she’d been hired to fact-check it.)

And They All Sang’s 44 subjects include plenty of giants: Ravi Shankar, Leonard Bernstein, Mahalia Jackson, Bob Dylan, and Janis Joplin. Most of these, like so many of Terkel’s interviews, he conducted on his radio show. The dialogue is consistently engaging—subject and interlocutor egging one another on, both parties clearly having a blast. Jazz pianist Keith Jarrett, never an easy interview, opens up as fully as born yakker (and folkie activist) Pete Seeger. Best of all is the opening Q&A with folk eccentric John Jacob Niles; it’s a rollercoaster, a forward-moving dance between two men whose steps are never predictable.

My own introduction to Terkel was 1992’s Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession. In one chapter, Terkel quotes a young hip-hop fan talking about the rapper “Iced Tea.” Of course, he meant Ice-T, but to me the point was clear: Here was a 79-year-old still plainly committed to capturing the whole picture, even if a detail or two is smudged. How many people can you say that about, all the way into their mid-90s? That misspelling, if anything, deepened the ethos of Terkel’s life and work: You might not know all the references, but what really matters is that you pay attention.

When two songs make a right

A great segue is where you find it—even if you weren’t necessarily on the lookout. The two I’m most besotted with lately mine narrow terrain—pop hits from the ’80s—but I came upon them in very different places.

The first caught me by surprise last week while visiting New York. I’m a night owl, and just prior to leaving the city I had roast chicken in Midtown at 3 a.m. The speakers were blaring Kim Wilde’s “Kids in America” —on what I assume was a digital music service’s ’80s station crated specially for restaurants. A number 25 hit in 1982, the song sounded like its usual self: rushed, laden with the harsh production gloss common to many of the decade’s big singles, and full of tinny cheer.

It would have stayed in the background, if a small noise that came from the kitchen door hadn’t startled me. When I looked up, Wilde’s song was gone, replaced by another 1982 hit: Joe Jackson’s “Steppin’ Out,” which crested at number 6 on the charts. It wasn’t just that I like Jackson’s song more, it’s that the two tracks pinched together in perfect rhythm. Some anonymous programmer had beat-matched them, DJ-style. The join was inaudible.

Of course, our mood improves when we hear a not-so-good song replaced by one we like. But, in this instance, it’s the way Jackson ’s track followed that tilted the axis: Wilde’s slaphappy song instantly acquired a retrospective urgency that it doesn’t quite reach on its own, while Jackson’s mannered cool loosened— his song was suddenly all rhythm. Together, they felt like the head and tail of the same animated idea.

The second sublime segue arrived via Poplife Sucks (N.E.W.S.), a new anthology compiled by the Glimmers and Olivier Tjon, to celebrate their Belgian club night, Poplife. I expected a good time from the collection.  The track list is one of the most impressive I’ve ever seen on a various-artists disc: club classics, brilliant obscurities, genre gems, and smart remixes covering wide swaths from the heavy rhythm of early-’70s Italian singer Adriano Celentano to Aphex Twin’s late-’90s electronica touchstone “Windowlicker,” and   early-’90s Mexican-American rapper Kid Frost to U.K. pop icons Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Unlike many similar constructions, Poplife Sucks isn’t DJ-mixed—its songs lay end-to-end or overlap slightly.

It’s one of these momentary blends that propels the set to its peak: when Liquid Liquid’s “Cavern” ends and the Time’s “Jungle Love” begins. If any one song captures the spirit of post-punk 1981, it’s “Cavern,” a hungry, fearsome workout of a piece with the DIY-rock fallout, but so funky that Melle Mel of the Furious 5 would adapt it for the hip-hop classic “White Lines (Don’t Don’t Do It).” “Jungle Love,” on the other hand, captures the spirit of big-pop 1984; it’s synth-funk grooves peppering the soundtrack to the biggest pop movie of the year, Purple Rain. “Cavern” ends with shakers breaking its rhythm down; “Jungle Love” begins with a cowbell and people making monkey sound. They make for a sharp transition, and the Time’s faster beat amps the party vibe.

There is, however, a larger resonance here: 1981 and 1984 mark the bumpers of one of pop’s most vibrant eras, one that laid the groundwork for the music business going forward: a churning of ideas from new wave to hip-hop that gradually went from upstart to mainstream. Prince is the most obvious example, moving from cult hero to superstar in these years. As the man who produced and played on the Time’s records, it’s fitting that he plays a key part in this mix. Though even he probably wouldn’t conceive of such a brilliant segue.

Did Motown lose its way in the 1970s?

I used to believe that compiling every Motown A-side up to about 1970 would create the greatest album of all time. Well, as it turns out, not quite. The Complete Motown Singles is a projected 12-volume, box set series released by Hip-O Select, an arm of Universal Music specializing in reissues and compilations. The first volume dropped in 2005 and covered 1959-1961; there’s a subsequent release for every year up through 1972. Vol. 10: 1970 is newly available.

Motown is frozen in the public’s mind as an unyielding hit machine with merciless quality control. Even in its prime, it wasn’t foolproof; at its ends, however, it was shakier. Early on, for example, founder Berry Gordy and his loyal staff tried just about any gimmick to make the charts—The Complete Motown Singles Vol. 2: 1962 features “Mind Over Matter,” recorded by the Pirates (a.k.a. the Temptations dressed up in, you guessed it, pirate costumes).

From 1964—when Motown transformed from little indie that could to Billboard juggernaut—to 1969, the label’s signature was its ability to absorb new styles. Dave Marsh’s book Heart of Rock & Soul notes that the Four Tops’s “Bernadette” incorporates Bob Dylan’s phrasing (“They pre-tend to be my friend”). The young Stevie Wonder cut a single of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” The label had several small but potent hits by Junior Walker, who connected to the more raw sound of the Stax label. Staff producer Norman Whitfield brought Sly Stone’s wild fusion of rock and R&B to the Temptations. The Supremes’ “Love Child” took on social issues while combining real toughness with sheer Broadway. However smooth it may have been on the surface, Motown kept up.

By 1970, Motown was no longer influenced by Bob Dylan; it was influenced by Bob Dylan’s second cousin’s friend’s brother-in-law. An oddly Hollywood-styled variant on free love had butted into Motown’s assembly line; so numerous are the awful love-will-save-the-universe lyrics that I flashed back to episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies involving hippies. On “As Long as I’ve Got You,” Danny Hernandez & the Ones opine: “Some guys are so busy taking all they can/They don’t stop to realize they’re on the losing end/Every guy needs to find somebody of his own/And stop this thing that’s going around breaking up people’s homes.” (The “thing” in question, of course, being hate.) Diana Ross’s solo debut, “Reach Out and Touch (Somebody’s Hand),” nods heavily to Bacharach-David’s “What the World Needs Now” (which Ross covered when with the Supremes) and features such clinkers as, “Would I be talking to a stone/If I asked you to share a problem that’s not your own?”

Motown also took a greater interest in rock. They’d taken chances on guitar bands earlier—most notably a Toronto-based, mixed-race group called the Mynah Birds, featuring the odd couple of Rick James and Neil Young (before they were famous). By 1970 Motown had a rock subsidiary called Rare Earth, named for a nondescript group whose major success came from artless covers of in-house classics re-arranged for loud fuzz pedal—like their hit version of the Temptations’ “Get Ready.” Another Motown hit of the time was R. Dean Taylor’s “Indiana Wants Me,” a credulity-stretching, folk-rock song about a criminal on the lam. It’s aged about as well as toast. The label also experimented with reggae with Bob & Marcia’s cover of Nina Simone’s “Young, Gifted & Black,” a 1969 British hit that Motown imported for Americans. It sunk like a stone, and Motown left reggae alone.

The hits on Vol. 10, of course, scorch almost uniformly. The Jackson 5 is the star act—represented by the unassailable hits “ABC,” “The Love You Save,” “I’ll Be There.” The box set confirms that the brothers were the recipients of the majority of the label’s resources at the time. The permanent revelation, however, is Stevie Wonder. The songs on Vol. 10–“Never Had a Dream Come True,” “Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours,” “Heaven Help Us All” (not to mention “It’s a Shame,” which he wrote and produced for the Spinners)—point out how badly he needed the creative freedom he would soon earn, while still raising the bar that his string of mid-’70s masterpieces had to clear.

I’ve listened to each Complete Motown Singles, but I don’t frequently go back. They’re built for an intensely deep dive—to come up and step away with a heightened understanding of Motown’s particular magic, how well it worked when everything went right, how awry it could seem when it didn’t, and where the label fit in its era. These boxes aren’t albums; they’re time machines.

 How Raphael Saadiq honors the past and blends in the present

The Way I See It (Columbia), the third solo album by Raphael Saadiq, is one of the more formally intriguing I’ve heard in a while. On it, a highly respected R&B veteran directly mimics soul music as it sounded in the decade prior to disco.

Saadiq, 42, began his career as Raphael Wiggins—though he was born Charlie Ray Wiggins—in Oakland, California’s Tony! Toni! Toné!, which he formed with his brother Dwayne and cousin Timothy Christian Riley. The band’s first hit, “Little Walter,” came 20 years ago. It was frisky new jack swing on its surface with a notably clear-voiced, excitable lead singer; underneath, it was a rewrite of “Wade in the Water.” It was a hint that Saadiq, the group’s leader and main songwriter, had a knack for making old things sound fresh. T!T!T! made more hits through the first half of the ’90s, most notably 1990’s “Feels Good” and 1993’s “If I Had No Loot.” Both records remain distinctively of their era yet seem timeless.

The group’s fourth album, House of Music, however, brought a subdued band name: Tony Toni Toné. Gone were the whimsical exclamation marks. The cover, a relatively somber black and white affair, featured a photo of the band (with backing musicians) sitting on benches, holding instruments. This was a grown-up album—a soaring, beautifully written and performed tour de force of a host of historically attuned R&B styles. The opening number, “Thinking of You,” is the most audacious—and most accurate—Al Green impersonation ever recorded. Saadiq’s gift for channeling the classic and converting it into the new was intensifying.

From its cover shot of Saadiq in a suit and glasses recalling top-Temptation David Ruffin to the music’s expert set pieces, The Way I See It could seem like a simple cash-in on the retro-soul sound that Amy Winehouse took pop. But Saadiq’s been doing this all along, albeit with a marketplace-savvy contemporary veneer. Right now, though, expert mimicking of old styles sells, as Saadiq, who produces the records of husky-voiced British soul upstart Joss Stone, surely knows. (Stone sings a duet with Saadiq, “Just One Kiss,” on The Way I See It.)

The Way I See It opens like a vintage Motown album, with a sweet, mid-tempo drag called “Sure Hope You Mean It.” The arrangement is precise: Holland-Dozier-Holland circa 1965, vibraphone notes hanging in the air during testifying-my-love verses, a Marv Tarplin-esque guitar leading the movement. “Oh Girl” is a shimmering Stylistics homage, right down to Saadiq’s nasal vocal delivery, a la lead Stylistic Russell Tompkins Jr. Curtis Mayfield-era Impressions gets its due on “Keep Marchin’,” from the song’s guitar-led strut to Saadiq’s fragile falsetto.

Saadiq’s isn’t satisfied merely re-creating the sound for his period pieces; his style of anachronism requires a blend of subtle touchstones and references to the social engagement of the bygone era’s R&B, as well. “Keep Marchin’” serves as a pep talk for leaving a bad relationship, while the song’s title clearly alludes to the civil rights movement. Similarly, “Big Easy” marries early-’60s New Orleans big brass with lyrics centered around Hurricane Katrina: “Somebody please tell me what’s going wrong/I ain’t seen my baby in far too long . . . They say them levees broke, and my baby’s gone.” The Way I See It gets all the details right, both retro terms—arrangements, mix, ambience—but in R&B terms as well: rhythm, sensuality, emotion.