LITMIR.BIZ

      EXAMPLE 3. Opening bass line of “I’m Gonna Love Just a Little More, Baby.”

      The piano figure that grows out of the harpsichord’s bass figure centers our attention, so that the other materials as they are introduced begin to give the impression of things that had already been present before we noticed them. After it enters at m.13, this piano suspension is present through the overwhelming majority of the song, disappearing only during a brief bridge at mm.97–104 and the six-bar choruses that appear at mm.51–56, 77–82, and 125–130. During all the passages in which the piano provides this structural armature, the harmony is relatively static in a fashion familiar from passages in the rest of the album; in this case, an ornamented suspension from A to G that ceaselessly repeats, with a G minor eleventh chord as the evolving background. The spoken lyrics are a direct imitation of bedroom talk, with White describing his actions and asking for feedback from his partner. The close miking creates a muffled intimacy in White’s spoken voice, as if heard through pillows, sheets, and a nurturing fierce dark. When the song finally turns toward the sung voice, the arrangement builds toward the threefold chant of the chorus, where White, in declaring his intention to “love,” “need,” and “want you” in amorous descending phrases that enact the intimacy they describe.

      And it all goes on for so long! The stretches of music dominated by the piano suspensions, since they repeat their two-bar units so inexorably, are quick to baffle analytical ears. The G minor eleventh chord does not need to resolve; it would rather glory in its thickness and in how its multifarious components can take on new connotations by simple shifts in voicing, instrumentation, and rhythmic articulation. An explicit token of this condition might be the soaring violin melody that drifts along for the twenty measures between the song’s bridge and the final appearance of the chorus. Its long tones and separation from the rest of the mix might be reminiscent of the violins in “Love’s Theme,” but this tune meanders; we never have a sense that the melody is heading anyplace special. This melody seeks neither climax nor cadence. It simply enjoys being. Considered broadly, then, this song is about the time it takes for pleasure and the will to have more of it. Would such a mode of consciousness been representable in soul before the beginning of the 1970s? In some of the work of James Brown, perhaps: otherwise, it is doubtful. Barry White’s evocation of gratified desire pays the kind of attention to the complexities of interior experience that would not have been heard by the record industry before the end of the 1960s, at least not in soul. And his appeal to individualistic luxury could not have found a hold in an audience not able to afford it.

      In the early 1990s, whenever he was asked his opinion of the disco era, Barry White remembered it as

      the most glamorous of our time. Guys was wearing jeans with studs, two hundred dollars a pair. Bleached-out with different colors, two, three hundred dollars . . . That was the only time when you could go into clubs and couldn’t tell the star from the consumer buyer. They both was dressed alike. It was the only era that allowed the consumer to pretend that he was an entertainer. They dressed in that era. . . . Then came the Eighties. The era of greed. That’s when I started hearing more songs that was written for money than I ever heard in my life.⁴¹

      Such Dionysian habits could propel star and fan into a vertiginous, blissful identity. This identification was one of the crucial reasons for disco’s appeal; it pulled listeners and dancers into a complex fantasy world where desires worked themselves out through material objects all the more attractive because they seemed to be instruments of the search for love rather than (or in addition to) things wonderful in themselves. As times grew colder and illusions of abundance were dispelled in energy crises and inflation, Barry White’s image came to seem ridiculous, out of touch with the anxieties of his audience. But recycling triumphs over all: those costly 1970s clothes are now sometimes available at any good thrift store, along with the old vinyl that gave soundtracks to the fashion show—if they haven’t already been snapped up by another dreamer. If we buy them now, it is because they represent an abundance to be measured in our dreams rather than in our realities. Barry White’s style of black masculinity can still matter because even when it spoke to us of wealth, what it meant to promise was expressive freedom and desire.

      CHAPTER 3

      Transport and Interiority in Soft Soul