"I saw seven songs carried on the back of a breeze, blowing through the record from start to finish." The nearly eight-minute title track establishes the Quiet Storm not as a meteorological phenomenon providing ambience, but as an intangible stimulant flowing through Robinson's body: "A power source of tender force." In his review, writer Robert Christgau keyed in on the album's most important contribution: ".rhythmically it seems to respond more to his internal state than to any merely physical criterion." Indeed, this is soul music aiming not for the hips, but a deeper metaphysical connection between two intimate lovers. A Quiet Storm plays like a concept album devoted to tranquil monogamy. The album re-energized Robinson's flagging career, helped by the fact that it fit well with a lot of black chart music at the time, which was doubling down on the initial break between the spiritual and the carnal that birthed soul music. Roberta Flack- her voice dubbed "the sound of melting velvet"- was a star, and her duets with classically-trained Donny Hathaway added a moody influence drawn from his jazz training. Al Green and Minnie Riperton took minimalist bedroom soul mainstream, largely owing to their ownership of their respective upper vocal registers. Jones" was three years old in '75, and that song's producers, Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, were coming off their remarkable peak of bringing lush strings and skittering hi-hats to R&B, more or less setting the template for disco. Marvin Gaye was in between Let's Get It On and I Want You. Barry White.īut in pop music, novelty is always more visible than continuity. And in the mid-70s it was disco that was quickly infiltrating pop radio and the charts. A 4/4 thump at 120 beats per minute became the dancefloor metronome, and lyrics about dancing, dancers, and the culture of the dancefloor were back with a vengeance. The one week that Quiet Storm's "Baby That's Backatcha" spent atop the R&B singles chart was preceded for two weeks by R&B veteran Joe Simon's cheesy disco pander "Get Down Get Down (Get on the Floor)" and followed by Kool & the Gang's spaced-out "Jungle Boogie" copy "Spirit of the Boogie". "Backatcha" was a #7 disco single- flutes and light Latin percussion buoyed the backbeat- but it was a Robinson disco single between two songs devoted to the pleasures of getting funky, Smokey turned up the gain on a couple's dancefloor conversation.
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