Weekend Music Club: A Physician’s Plea for Music with Soul

[This article posted on May 23, 2009. It is posted within the following categories: Diversions, via Michael Douglas, MD, MBA.]

So I’m sitting back and spending an on-call weekend at my computer, jamming to a really cool internet 80′s station, and I’m instantly taken back to the spring of ’88. The song “Back In The High Life” by Steve Winwood recalls a wildly different, but quaintly pristine time in my life where the biggest concern was whether or not I were going to get into medical school. But the song, particularly, the artist — allowed me to wax nostagic about something else I miss in that era of late 1980′s pop music besides the academic albatross of a premedical curriculum that went with it: the domination of blue-eyed soul tunes on top-40 pop radio.

Blue-eyed soul is a term which goes far beyond its concrete meaning. When that other cool era of pop music — the 1960′s — reigned supreme, white artists who could do more than just carry a tune … but actually deliver it in such a soulful and expressive manner, brought music lovers of all ages and races together for only one cause: the love of a song with a great beat. Spearheaded at that time by the likes of the Righteous Bros., Dusty Springfield, and Tom Jones, naysayers who were quick to ridicule them just a few years later for the more dominant and “hipper” musical ideals of Motown or Beatlemania, have since returned to claim the blue-eyed soul sound in full force.

Today, almost twenty years removed from the end of the 1980′s, I am claiming — and will always do so — that newer era (renaissance, if you will) of blue-eyed soul music. Steve Winwood led the pack with a mature soulful groove in his manner and lyric (for example, the #1 hit “Higher Love” from 1986, which featured Chaka Khan, only added to that track’s soulful luster); Rick Astley, who nowadays is known for other reasons to a much younger generation, took his cue from deep baritone vocal influences — not to mention creating his own brand of white boy U.K. soul; and Daryl Hall & John Oates — the most successful duo in pop music history — even had a #1 R&B hit in 1981 (“I Can’t Go For That [No Can Do]“).

Heck, even George Michael won an American Music Award for ‘Best Black Album’ with Faith (which spawned its own #1 R&B hit with “One More Try” in 1988).

Oh, how I miss those days. In a time in which pop music among today’s white crossover artists sounds more like a silly synth beat slapped atop an even more inane T-Pain vocoder sample, I’ll take my soulful ’80s white-soul crossovers anytime, thank you very much. BTW, Steve Winwood just came out with an absolutely killer live 2CD set with Eric Clapton (a 70′s white-soul holdover). Excuse me, but I think I’ll put that baby in my iPod now.