Joe McElderry sang the track in 2009 on The X Factor and it re-entered the UK charts. The track was a personal highlight for Luther in his career and landed at 38 in the US chart and 21 in the UK chart at its peak. This includes Beyonce, Stevie Wonder, Whitney Houston, Babyface, Ashanti, Patti LaBelle, Brandy, Quincy Jones, Wyclef Jean and Shaquille O'Neal. West made it faster to emphasize the syncopation, slyly speeding up a slow-jam specialist.The music video for ‘Dance With My Father’ is filled with famous faces who celebrate and remember their fathers. Vandross's ad-libs from the end of "A House Is Not a Home." It's a quick little vocal run - "Are you gonna be/ Say you're gonna be/ Are you gonna be/ Say you're gonna be/ Are you gonna be/ Say you're gonna be/ Well, well well, well" - but Mr. The song was built around a snippet of one of Mr. It was "Slow Jamz," a collaboration between Kanye West, Twista and Jamie Foxx. Vandross was surprisingly versatile: he sounded equally comfortable over a disco beat or a hip-hop track, as he proved on his great, self-titled 2001 album, as well as the sometimes-great 2003 follow-up, "Dance With My Father," which included collaborations with Busta Rhymes and Beyoncé.īut the best of all the recent Luther Vandross songs wasn't really a Luther Vandross song at all. Kelly, thrills fans by reminding them of his body and what it wants you invite him into your bedroom at your peril (which is part of the fun). Vandross irrelevant in our current, lechery-obsessed era. For a disembodied voice, love is always unconsummated even his most passionate songs were somehow untainted by lechery.Īll of this could have conspired to make Mr. And that's part of the reason so many of his best songs had an undercurrent of melancholy. Vandross was first and foremost a disembodied voice, which is part of the reason he remains the gold standard in make-out music: you can bring him into your bedroom without worrying that he'll steal the show. Vandross (who struggled with his weight throughout his life) was never a conventional heartthrob he was a lifelong bachelor whose fanatical female fans swooned more for the songs than for the singer.įor Ms. Vandross wasn't nearly as pushy: his voice was so silky you could almost forget that it came from a real person. Vandross's grittier soul-man predecessors used vocal quirks - a rasp, a shout, a roar - to assert their presence as singers and as seducers, Mr. Vandross himself spoke bitterly about his failure to become a mainstream pop star even when he was collaborating with David Bowie, he remained throughout his marvelous career a "quintessential R&B singer," and he helped generations of singers and listeners understand that the title wasn't faint praise. Vandross was somehow too smooth for his own good and that he was too eager to leave black musical traditions behind. There's an underlying suggestion in these appraisals that Mr. Vandross helped move R&B away from its roots: "By coyly distancing himself from the black gospel vocal tradition, which grounded so much of the soul music of the 1960's and 1970's, Vandross cemented his appeal as the quintessential R&B singer."
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Last month, the cultural critic Mark Anthony Neal wrote the first in a series of articles about "The Slow Decline of R&B" (published online at in which he suggested that Mr.
Vandross "put out albums without the aid of black retailers," and counts him (alongside Lionel Richie, Michael Jackson, Prince and others) among the early-80's black pop stars who "relied on white figures for guidance." George links his success to the decline of the black music industry. Vandross for the final chapter, "Assimilation Triumphs, Retronuevo Rises (1980-87)." Although he doesn't slight Mr. In his 1988 book, "The Death of Rhythm & Blues," the critic Nelson George saves Mr. Vandross was a more vexing figure, sometimes viewed with suspicion by critics and listeners who were ambivalent about (or hostile to) the era he represented: an era in which 1970's soul had given way to 1980's R&B. But as the accolades roll in, it's worth remembering that when he was alive Mr.
Vandross glide through "A House Is Not a Home," his career-defining 1981 ballad, will be inclined to argue with that assessment. Artists, friends and fans paid tribute to one of the era's great crooners Patti LaBelle summed up the mood when she told MTV, "He was one of the greatest voices that ever sang a song." When Luther Vandross died on Friday, having never fully recovered from a stroke he suffered in 2003, he was remembered fondly and unanimously.
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