No fewer than 53 Motown Records singles reached number one on the Billboard pop charts between 1959 and 1988, the years Berry Gordy Jr. owned and operated the company. But the Marvelettes’ “Please Mr. Postman” got there first, igniting a musical, social and cultural revolution that continues to resound across the decades. KSID::Z142e305301A32
Jason Ankeny
Katrina and the Waves bask in the afterglow of ‘Walking on Sunshine’
The world could solve its energy crisis if science could somehow harness the boundless optimism of Katrina and the Waves’ “Walking on Sunshine.” It’s the rictus grin stretched across the face of Eighties pop, the perpetual positivity machine that continues its inexorable march across the cultural landscape — a song flexible enough to integrate seamlessly […]
Rare Earth’s ‘I Just Want to Celebrate’ remains a feel-good hit for all time
“I Just Want to Celebrate” is the Motown Records hit you never thought would echo across the decades. Its seismic funk-rock groove is an enduring signifier of the song’s moment of creation — of all the chart singles recorded in 1971, it might be the ‘71-iest — but its lust for life crackles with renewed […]
The Jonas Brothers grow up and blow up with the chart-topping ‘Sucker’
The Jonas Brothers want you to know they fuck now. The libidinous “Sucker,” the sibling trio’s first single and music video after a six-year creative hiatus, commemorates their passage from purity rings to wedding bands, from Disney-branded teen heartthrobs to mature, stylish pop stars in command of their own lives and careers — in short, […]
The Allman Brothers Band’s ‘Statesboro Blues’ remains a slide show for the ages
The Allman Brothers Band played four shows over two nights in the course of producing its creative and commercial breakthrough, the classic live LP At Fillmore East, and while the setlists varied from performance to performance, all four opened with the blistering “Statesboro Blues.” And for good reason: The Piedmont blues barnstormer — a showcase […]
‘Mama Tried’ reveals the real Merle Haggard and reinvents country music
“Men are what their mothers made them,” Ralph Waldo Emerson famously declared, and with 1968’s Bakersfield Sound bildungsroman “Mama Tried,” Merle Haggard finally came to terms with the man his mother made — not just the transgressions he committed, but also the pleas and prayers he ignored, and the damage that was done. KSID::P1V201Y2P212S
Edwin Starr declares ‘War’ on the pop charts — and comes out the winner
“War” is a howl of psychic agony — a harrowing, hallucinatory broadside against America’s involvement in the decades-long conflict in Vietnam, and the immense human toll it exacted. KSID::d53Z0632F05391
‘You Can’t Hurry Love’ signals the beginning of the end for the Supremes
“You Can’t Hurry Love” boasts all the essential ingredients of the Supremes’ greatest Motown hits — all of them except for Florence Ballard, that is. Ballard, the talented but troubled Supremes vocalist pushed out of the spotlight by Motown brass in favor of Diana Ross, was absent for the session that produced “You Can’t Hurry […]
Johnny Cash returns to the scene of the crime to revamp ‘Folsom Prison Blues’
Johnny Cash opened the newspaper on the morning of July 18, 1986 to read that after 28 years, 57 albums and 13 number one hits, his days with Columbia Records were over. The 54-year-old Cash — the iconic Man in Black, whose cavernous baritone, plainspoken narratives and signature boom-chicka-boom rhythm revolutionized American music — was […]
J. Geils Band turns the page and tops the charts with ‘Centerfold’
“Where such men love, they have no desire, and where they desire, they cannot love,” Sigmund Freud wrote in 1925 to illuminate what he famously dubbed the Madonna-whore complex — i.e., the dichotomy between the women a man finds admirable and those he finds sexually desirable, and the schism at the heart of the J. […]
