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08/13/2003 Entry: "Sam Cooke"
Sam Cooke
A wonderful essay on Sam Cooke by Robert Christgau in the Voice. I really only started listening to Cooke in the last few months, but I've been reading a lot about him lately (in both Arthur Kempton's Boogaloo and Peter Guralnick's Sweet Soul Music), and I think Christgau's comparison of him to Elvis is apt. Not in his ultimate impact (at least on black teenagers--though he influenced a large number of musicians, not least Curtis Mayfield), but in his ambitions and his overall approach to music. My favorite phrase in the article is the description of Cooke's and Presley's "vocal transparency." It's the perfect description of a quality that is otherwise almost impossible to describe, that paradoxical sense of being not so much above the world, or above life, as wrapped around and through it, of permeating every possible event or emotion, both solid and airy, earthly and spiritual (and, of course, none of the above). It takes a remarkable simplicity, and a very canny and unselfconcious intelligence, to achieve (Aretha Franklin has something close to it, as did Kurt Cobain). The difference between Elvis and Cooke in this regard is that Elvis looked for that simplicity in the songs he chose to sing, whereas Cooke wrote most of his himself, and and formulated a set of rules for maintaining that quality that makes his songs look shallow and facile at first, and then reveal new and extraordinary depths every time you listen to them. Elvis's method was more hit or miss, less calculated, but he also aimed, and scored, higher than Cooke. Cooke, though, had he lived, would have had the longer lasting and more respectable career. Gurlanuick is working on a biography of Cooke, by the way, due out sometime next year.
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Posted by online casinos @ 03/18/2005 02:03 PM PST
