Tired of 2007? Already over 2008? Don’t care either way? Check out these underrated sweethearts from all eras and epochs of music:
1. Roberta Flack: R&B’s Queen of the Slow Burn helped invent the style known as “quiet storm” with her spacious, jazz-tinged hits, and for that she’s been unduly punished.. Big emoters like Patti and Aretha are easier to mama-lionize, but some of our most beloved chanteuses (Sade, Norah Jones, Alicia Keys) follow as much in Flack’s hushed footsteps. One scholar – New York University professor Jason King – has eloquently made her case in print, but she deserves a bigger place in the pantheon.
2. Daryl Hall: He’s been rewarded with many hits and a revival of late, but too often, the glammer half of Hall & Oates is still pegged as a yacht-rock decadent — when he was really a New Wave groundbreaker. “Sacred Songs,” his 1980 solo debut, was produced by loops-loving King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp, and stands up to anything Bowie did in his Very Blond years. Hall is also a major collaborator on the best experimental pop record you’ve never heard: Fripp’s fantastic 1979 solo debut, “Exposure.” These outings prove that Hall is not only the most gifted white soulman of his era; he’s an artiste too.
3. The Mekons: It’s true that critics of a certain age absolutely love the Mekons, who’ve been making brainy, drunken rock and roll for 30 years. But while fashionable young rockers are happily cannibalizing Gang of Four and Joy Division, this mightily enduring post-punk institution isn’t getting revived by anyone. Partly, that’s because they’re still putting out their own great albums – check out their 16th, “Natural,” minted in 2007. But really, the Mekons stand alone because their humanity, intelligence and wise good-time energy can’t be imitated. May they endure forever.
4. Hal David: Burt Bacharach in his turtleneck may epitomize midcentury cool, and Dionne Warwick was the voice that made him so. But did you ever think about who wrote the lyrics to those great songs? Hal David is the master of the telling detail: the makeup Warwick’s putting on as she says a little prayer for you, or the one less egg to fry that signifies heartbreak in that Fifth Dimension song. Honored by his own, he’s rarely acknowledged outside songwriter circles. I’d like to see him become our poet laureate.
5. Trent Reznor: Instead of just aging into the dystopian version of hair metal nostalgia, Trent Reznor made “Year Zero,” a strong, political album wrapped up in a fascinating alternate reality game. “Year Zero” took his artistic vision to the next level, posing a serious challenge to other artists to really consider the formerly “peripheral” elements of a marketing campaign to be part of the artistic expression itself, and to go beyond old definitions of pop artist. Then, a few months later, he helped poet-rapper-rocker Saul Williams release his excellent new album (which Reznor produced) via the Internet through a pay-what-you-want model. With that, Reznor became the first (and so far only) truly established star to take Radiohead’s dare; something that will have to happen a lot more if the “In Rainbows” campaign is to have any effect. Of course, because Reznor is an over-40 rocker identified with the ’90s — that strange epoch during which rockers actually took themselves seriously — most hipsters just laugh him off now. But he gets the future. And he’s still part of it.
–Ann Powers
[Photo: Flack and Peabo Bryson. Credit: Geraldine Wilkins Kasinga / LAT]
