The Entroporium

First in an occasional series

Raphael Saadiq started out in Oakland’s Tony Toni Tone and went solo after they busted up a few years ago. The break-up was a shame because the band had evolved from Boy2Men-style juvenilia to sophisticated R&B pastiche and was purported to be a terrific live act. House Of Music, which I’ll reserve for a future post, is one of my all-time favorites. When it came on the scene at roughly the same time as D’Angelo, it looked like the annual rumors of ‘The Return of Soul’ might finally come true on the radio. But that’s another story.

Saadiq’s first album under his own name was 2002′s Instant Vintage. It had terrific production, an exciting roster of guest stars (D’Angelo, T-Boz from TLC and Angie Stone among others) and a number of agreeable if slightly samely potential hit singles. Since he is a bass player, I was willing to give him a pass for all the groove-based songs, but he showed a lot of growth as a songwriter and a producer, giving me hope that this would be a guy I could follow for a long time.

A live album followed, accompanied by his 9-piece band, but rumor had it that he’d been dropped by UMG. And when you’re dropped, that means no more band if you can’t pay them. And that means self-production. For some guys, this can work out great (John Cale and Mark Eitzel leap to mind), but for others the lack of creative partnership can be deadly.

It (may) follow then that Saadiq’s new album, As Ray Ray, is a complete production nightmare. It sounds like he’s just learned how to program MIDI. The instrument patches are all wrong, the mixes head-scratching and the beats sound like they’re not even tracked to against the rest of the music. It’s a disaster. (Oddly, As Ray Ray received several good reviews, but this makes me wonder if the critics even opened the CD before they wrote it.)

Worst of all, he seems to have lost his mind too – or at least his songwriting chops. Like Garth Brooks, Saadiq gives himself a false identity from which he can sing his new ‘nastier’ material. It’s a pseudo-blaxploitation gangster fantasy, but it doesn’t have much threat or make much sense. In the end, it’s an excuse to do lazily misogynistic material. And it just doesn’t work.

I’m not just picking on some half-baked track towards the end of the record, either. “This One” (today’s MP3) is the fourth track — but the first fully-realized non-jokey song on the record, in itself a pretty bad sign for a fourth track. The first time I heard this track I thought, Man! something is wrong! Is this a bad file?

Saadiq’s web site promises some good things ahead. I’m rooting for the comeback.

[Soundtrack]
Good Saadiq: Raphael Saadiq – Different Times (w/T-Boz from TLC)
Bad Saadiq: Raphael Saadiq – This One

(Aside for another discussion: Has there ever been another female Top 40 singer who has sold as many records with as little vocal range as T-Boz?)