Songs on the new Stones album might rev me up down the line, but I was put off by early hosannahs for the faux-gospel “Sweet Sounds of Heaven” which features Lady Gaga and Stevie Wonder. Compare “Heaven” with live collabs between Stevie and the Stones from 1972, when they’d mash up “Uptight” and “Satisfaction.” (You can watch here — check Mick and Stevie’s dance — now that’s a throwback!)
Everyone knows what the Stones got from their Blues masters/elders, but they once kept an ear out for the changing same in a range of black musics — from reggae to disco. (I’m recalling with joy their post-60s collaborations with Blue Magic and Peter Tosh, Sonny Rollins and Sugar Blue.) Perhaps their history of crossover hurricanes ended aptly with the appropriation of the appropriators — that moment when Michael Jackson had his studio pros snatch the riff for “Black or White” from the last song on the worst Stones record ever. But I’m not hot for a cultural politics of comeuppance. What’s more ponderable is how the Stones stopped sounding vital around the time they ceased keeping up with what was in black people’s hearts and minds (and playlists). When tracks on Hackney Diamonds sound like hack work, my instincts tell me that’s because the Stones are no longer clocking musical culture(s) that gave them their vocation to begin with.
On that score, Lady Gaga isn’t nada, but in a world where Jekalyn Carr’s glorious gospel is hardly known outside black American communities, what’s the point in being a Rolling Stone if you’re not steering your fans toward miracles like this…
Ms. Carr gets her back into her ecstasies (above) and then tries to step off around 21:45 — she’s surely earned her exit — but host Kirk Franklin won’t take the mic. He pushes her back out on the stage. When she’s really done, a couple of Franklin’s boys hit the scorched stage and burn it down all over again.
JC has a new record, Jekalyn, out this month. It’s not as soul-catapulting as her show in Houston. I’ll allow I can’t quite suss the product, which seems to have been recorded in a stadium — though it’s not a live record. Carr might be singing with a real chorus and an added-on synthesized instrumental backdrop — some kind of music minus one construct? The concept of Jekalyn won’t do. If there’s a live component, there’s nothing as galvanizing as her call-and-response with those wonderful singers in the chorus at the Atlanta show I wrote up here a couple years ago. Yet JC (and her Sisters) are still pretty irresistible. The choral arrangement of the album’s first single, “I Believe God,” is elegant. (The song’s amateurish vid isn’t, though maybe it will serve as an ad for JC’s makeup line — and bless all her black enterprises.)
Charles Keil once underscored the difference between wild R&B live shows and the staider stuff that made it on to records in the 50s and early 60s. The distinction is still on time when it comes to the difference between JC’s new recorded product and her live sets. But I’m not here to kvetch at kitsch. Any way Jekalyn rolls — “God answers by fire, God answers by rain” — I do believe I’m at her…