SUMMER SONGS 08: GREG TATE

Editor's Note: It is difficult to imagine a more influential, contemporary music writer than Greg Tate. Since first emerging in the 1980s as part of the Village Voice's remarkable collection of talent, Tate has become the critical voice of a generation, especially for hip-hop and R&B obsessives, but his range is far beyond that of a "rap critic." As insightful as he is incisive, political and polemical without being a demagogue, Tate was a major force behind ushering in a new era for rock and pop criticism. His collection of essays from the mid-1990s, Flyboy in the Buttermilk had a profound effect on me as a budding writer and a decade-plus later, he continues to inspire, including with his 2003 anthology Everything But the Burden. Tate is currently working on a biography of James Brown. For his summer songs post, he takes us back to 1989 - the number, another summer, hot damn - and the sound of Soul II Soul's funky drubbing. --O.W.

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Written by Greg Tate

Soul II Soul: Keep On Movin'
From Keep On Movin' (Virgin, 1989)

There are songs about summer and then there are songs that own summertime, in ways Gershwin would scarcely recognize and that Sly Stone used to epitomize. The last time i experienced a summer song as a full-blown cultural phenom was when Soul II Soul burst onto Gotham's underground club scene in 1989 with "Keep On Moving".

Some of us thought we were at beginning of the next British Invasion--"Only This Time They're Taking The Hood. " “Keep On" was an instant classic if there ever was one and made a slow burn through the city's soul-house dance clubs that winter. It remains one of those rare mid-tempo but guaranteed-to-rock-the-floor anthems, mainly because of Caron Wheeler - a then-new, amazing voice with a smooth and otherworldly Afro-diasporic attack--a kind of Black power action figure turned astral figure, skating above the beat in ways that seemed to fuse Sarah Vaughn's lush and resplendent surface with Aretha's aching and triumphant heart.

It was also modern R&B's first real answer to the call of Public Enemy, spiritually and sonically. Not in obvious ways mind you--but unless I'm way-all-kindsa-wrong, “Keep on Moving” was the first major R&B radio hit of its era to use a classic, sampled drum loop-(Oliver thinks it from Graham Central Station's "The Jam") to as powerful an effect as P.E. were around then. I also hear in Nelee Hooper's crisp arrangement the embrace of Barry White's lowdown symphonic love-funk. The lyrics were vague enough to be taken as just about dancing but any time Black people start talking about the sun and what time it is, I tend to smell revolution cooking in the air. Soul II Soul's power-trio of dreads--Wheeler, ringleader Jazzie B and serpentine dance-weaver Wunmi, all silhouetted on the 12” single and on the album's cover, made you wonder if something more incendiary was brewing behind those instructions to keep it moving.

When it comes to #1 hits, 1989 was not a year big on racial uplift on the soul charts, nor big on hip hop. Only De La Soul’s “Me, Myself and I” coming atcha from the mean streets of Amityville, Long Island made the cut that year and even in Brooklyn, women in locks weren't a preferred look for a sister in R&B drag. For those of us under the spell of P.E.,N.W.A., KRS-One, De La and Tribe more than Chuckie Booker, Babyface and - yikes - Jermaine Jackson (who also scored a #1 that year if you really want to put a bygone era in complete perspective), Soul II Soul loomed as the antidote from across the pond to the refried and over-synthesized black bourgeois light bedroom fare that R&B had become by then.

If you found your soul release in clubbing back then you knew there was this thing called tribal house that was keeping the funk alive but Soul II Soul had opted not for house's four-on-the-floor bacchanal. They chose instead a throwback to a more laid-back and lush moment when arrangers like Barry White and Gamble and Huff had perfected a groove for urban dance songs that privileged chill-syncopated-sensuality over hot-sexual-gymnastics. I remember the song being a balm and a lift to the assembled whenever it came on; Wheeler's transcendent and insistent voice taking you back to an even more bygone moment in R&B history, the halcyon and honestly never overhyped 60s, when Sly, James ,Gladys, Curtis and Marvin made even their love and dance songs seem as galvanizing and topical as King's dream of people getting to the mountaintop.

The point at which I knew “Keep On” truly owned the city that summer was when I heard it rumbling full blast out of every crewed-up jeep that rolled through my crack house infested neighborhood, Harlem's Washington Heights. The song’s loud and proud embrace by Harlem's most thuggish was itself a throwback to the days before gangsta and rap machismo were smushed together and the roughest cats anybody knew favored the smoothest music around. By the time Soul II Soul was set to debut one especially humid late-summer night at NY's old Palladium, the stage was set for a UK soul takeover. And as he jeeps barreled up and down 14th street blasting the song upon arrival from The Bronx, Brooklyn and uptown, the distance between the basement, the march, the church, and the pavement got obliterated.

Unfortunately, by the time the band got to New York, internal strife had caused a split between Jazzie B and Wheeler; she wasn’t there, they took way too long to come on, air went out of our collective sails, et al. What should have been their triumphant Manhattan arrival was a major letdown. The Soul II Soul family wasn't broken--the group went on to sell more records--but neither Wheeler, Jazzie or me ever had another soul-power summer moment like the one 'Keep on Moving' made jump-off.